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PBEFATORY NOTE. 

The standard and indisper.sable authority on the life of Lander is 
the work of the late Mr. John Forster, viz, : 

1. Forster, John : "Walter Savage Landor, a Biography, London, 

Chapman and Hall; first edition in 2 vols., 1869; second 
edition, abridged, forming vol. i. of the collected " Life and 
Works of Walter Savage Landor" in 8 vols., 1876. 
Mr. Forster was appointed by Landor himself as his literary exec- 
utor ; he had command of all the necessary materials for his task, 
and his book is written with knowledge, industry, affection, and loy- 
alty of purpose. But it is cumbrous in comment, inconclusive in 
criticism, and vague on vital points, especially on points of bibliog- 
raphy, which in the case of Landor are frequently both interesting 
and obscure. The student of Landor must supplement the work of 
Mr. Forster from other sources, of which the principal are the fol- 
lowing : 

2. Hunt, J. E. Leigh, Lord Byron and his Contemporaries. Lon- 

don, 1827. 

3. Blessington, Marguerite, Countess of, The Idler in Italy, 2 vols. 

London, 1839. Lady Blessington's first impressions of Lan- 
dor are reported in vol. ii. of the above ; her correspondence 
with him, and an Imaginary Conversation by Landor not else- 
where reprinted, will be found in 

4. Madden, R. R., The Literary Life and Correspondence of the 

Countess of Blessington, 3 vols. London, 1855. 

5. The New Spirit of the Age, edited by R. H. Home. 2 vols. 

London, 1844. The article on Landor in vol. i. of the above 
is by Miss Barrett, afterwards Mrs. Browning, supplemented 
by the editor. 

6. Emerson, R. W., English Traits. London, 1856, 



vi PREFATORY NOTE. 

7. Field, Kate, Last Days of Walter Savage Landor, a series of 

three articles in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine for 1866. 

8. Robinson, H. Crabbe, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence 

of, edited by Thomas Sadler, 3 vols. London, 1869. 

9. Dickens, Charles : A short article on Forster's " Biography " in 

All the Year Round for 1869, supplementing with some strik- 
ing physiognomic touches the picture of Landor drawn by the 
same hand in "Bleak House" (see below, p. 178). 

10. Linton, Mrs. E. Lynn : Reminiscences of Walter Savage Landor, 

in Eraser's Magazine for July, 1870 ; by far the best account 
of the period of Landor's life to which it refers. 

11. Houghton, Lord : Monographs. London, 1873. 

I forbear to enumerate the various articles on Landor and his 
works which I have consulted in reviews and magazines between the 
dates 1798 and 1870; several of the most important are mentioned 
in the text. In addition to the materials which exist in print, 1 have 
had the advantage of access to some unpublished. To Mr. Robert 
Browning in particular my thanks are due for his great kindness in 
allowing me to make use of the collection of books and manuscripts 
left him by Landor, including Landor's own annotated copies of some 
of his rarest writings, and a considerable body of his occasional jot- 
tings and correspondence. Mr, Augustus J. C. Hare was also good 
enough to put into my hands a number of letters written by Landor 
to his father and to himself. To Lord Houghton I am indebted for 
help of various kinds, and to Mr. Swinburne for his most friendly 
pains in looking through the sheets of my work, and for many valu- 
able suggestions and corrections. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAQB 

Birth and Parentage — School — College . . . .1 



CHAPTER II. 

Experiments in Life and Poetry — Gebir . . .18 

CHAPTER III. 

More Experiments and Marriage — Bath — Spain — Llanthony 

— Count Julian 41 

CHAPTER IV. 

Life at Tours^-Como — Pisa — Idyllia Heroica . . ■ ^^. 

CHAPTER V. 
Life at Florence — The Imaginary Conversations . . 98 

CHAPTER VI. 

Fiesole and England — The Examination op Shakspeare — 

Pericles and Aspasia — The Pentameron . . .133 



viii CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER Vn. 

. PAGE 

Life at Bath — Dramas — Hellenics — Last Fruit — Dry Sticks, 171 



CHAPTER Vin. 
Second Exile and Last Days — Heroic Idyls — Death . . 203 

CHAPTER IX. 
Conclusion . . o 217 



L ANDO R. 

CHAPTER. I. 

BIRTH AND PARENTAGE SCHOOL COLLEGE. 

[1775— 1794.] 

Few men have ever impressed their peers so much, or the 
general public so little, as Walter Savage Landor. Of 
all celebrated authors, he has hitherto been one of the 
least popular. Nevertheless he is among the most strik- 
ing figures in the history of English literature; striking 
alike by his character and his powers. Personally, Landor 
exercised the spell of genius upon every one who came 
near him. His gifts, attainments, impetuosities, his origi- 
nality, his force, his charm, were all of the same conspic- 
uous and imposing kind. Not to know what is to be 
known of so remarkable a man is evidently to be a loser. 
Not to be familiar with the works of so noble a writer is 
to be much more of a loser still. 

The place occupied by Landor among English men of 
letters is a place apart. He wrote on many subjects and 
in many forms, and was strong both in imagination and in 
criticism. He was equally master of Latin and English', 
and equally at home in prose and verse. He cannot prop- 
1* 



2 LANDOR. [chap. 

erly be associated with any given school, or, indeed, with 
any given epoch, of our literature, as epochs are usually 
counted, but stands alone, alike by the character of his 
mind and by the tenour and circumstances of his life. 
It is not easy to realize that a veteran who survived to 
receive the homage of Mr. Swinburne can have been 
twenty-five years old at the death of Cowper, and forty- 
nine at the death of Byron. Such, however, was the case 
of Landor. It is less than seventeen years since he died, 
and less than eighteen since he published his last book ; 
his first book had been published before Buonaparte was 
consul. His literary activity extended, to be precise, over 
a period of sixty -eight years (1*795 — 1863). Neither was 
his career more remarkable for its duration than for its 
proud and consistent independence. It was Landor's 
strength as well as his weakness that he was all his life 
a law to himself, writing in conformity with no standards 
and in pursuit of no ideals but his own. 

So strong, indeed, was this instinct of originality in 
Landor that he declines to fall in with the thoughts or 
to repeat the words of others even when to do so would 
be most natural. Though an insatiable and retentive 
reader, in his own writing he does not choose to deal in the 
friendly and commodious currency of quotation, allusion, 
and reminiscence. Everything he says must be his own, 
and nothing but his own. On the other hand, it is no part 
of Landor's originality to provoke attention, as many even 
of illustrious writers have done, by emphasis or singularity 
of style. Arbitrary and vehement beyond other men in 
many of his thoughts, in their utterance he is always 
sober and decorous. He delivers himself of whatever is 
in his mind with an air, to borrow an expression of his 
own, " majestically sedate." Again, although in saying 



I.] BIRTH AND PARENTAGE. 3 

what lie chooses to say, Landor is one of the clearest and 
most direct of writers, it is his pleasure to leave much 
unsaid of that which makes ordinary writing easy and 
effective. He is so anxious to avoid saying what is su- 
perfluous that he does not always say what is necessary. 
As soon as he has given adequate expression to any idea, 
he leaves it and passes on to the next, forgetting some- 
times to make clear to the reader the connexion of his 
ideas with one another. 

These qualities of unbending originality, of lofty self- 
control, and of deliberate parsimony in utterance, are 
evidently not the qualities to carry the world by storm. 
Neither did Landor expect to carry the world by storm. 
He wrote less for the sake of pleasing others than himself. 
He addressed a scanty audience w^hile he lived, but looked 
forward with confidence to one that should be more nu- 
merous in the future, although not very numerous even 
then. " I shall dine late ; but the dining-room will be 
well-lighted, the guests few and select." In the meantime 
Landor contented himself with the applause he had, and 
considering whence that applause came, he had, indeed, 
good reason to be content. His early poem of Gebir was 
the delight first of Southey and afterwards of Shelley, 
who at college used to declaim it with an enthusiasm 
which disconcerted his friends, and which years did not 
diminish. The admiration of Southey for Landor's poetry 
led the way to an ardent and lasting friendship between 
the two men. By Wordsworth Landor was regarded less 
warmly than by Southey, yet with a respect which he ex- 
tended to scarcely any other writer of his time. Hazlitt, 
who loved Wordsworth little and Southey less, and on 
whose dearest predilections Landor unsparingly tram- 
pled, nevertheless acknowledged the force of his genius. 



4 LANDOR. [chap. 

Charles Lamb was at one time as great a reader and 
quoter of Gehir as Shelley himself, and at another could 
not dismiss from his mind or lips the simple cadences of 
one of Landor's elegies. De Quincey declared that his 
Count Julian was a creation worthy to take rank beside the 
Prometheus of ^schylus, or Milton's Satan. As the suc- 
cessive volumes of his Imaginary Conversations appeared, 
they seemed to some of the best minds of the time to con- 
tain masterpieces almost unprecedented not only of Eng- 
lish composition, but of insight, imagery, and reflection. 
The society of their author was sousjht and cherished bv 
the most distinguished of his countrymen. The members 
of the scholar family of Hare, and those of the warrior 
family of Napier, were among his warmest admirers and 
closest friends. Coming down to a generation of which 
the survivors are still with us, Dickens, Carlyle, Emerson, 
Lord Houghton, Robert and Elizabeth Browning have been 
among those who have delighted to honour him ; and the 
list might be brought down so as to include names of all 
degrees of authority and standing. While the inultitude 
has ignored Landor, he has been for three generations teach- 
ing and charming those who in their turn have taught and 
charmed the multitude. 

By his birthplace, as he loved to remem.ber, Landor was 
a neighbour of the greatest English poets. He was born 
at Warwick on the 30th of January, 1775. He was proud 
of his lineage, and fond of collecting evidences of its 
antiquity. His family had, in fact, been long one of prop- 
erty and position in Staffordshire. He believed that it 
had originally borne the name of Del-a La'nd or De la 
Laundes, and that its descent could be traced back for 
seven hundred years ; for about half that time, said his 
less credulous or less imaginative brother. AVhat is cer- 



I.] BIRTH AND PARENTAGE. 6 

tain is that some of the Staffordshire Landors had made 
themselves heard of in the wars of King and Parliament. 
A whig Landor had been high sheriff of the county at 
the Revolution of 1688; his grandson, on the other hand, 
was a marked man for his leanings towards the house of 
Stuart. A son of this Jacobite Landor being head of the 
family in the latter part of the last century, was at the 
same time engaged in the practice of medicine at War- 
wick. This Dr. Landor was Walter Savage Landor's 
father. 

Of Dr. Landor the accounts which have reached us are not 
sufficient to convey any very definite image. His memory 
survives only as that of a polished, sociable, agreeable, some- 
what choleric gentleman, more accomplished and better 
•^iducated, as his profession required, than most of those 
with whom he associated, but otherwise dining, coursing, 
telling his story and drinking his bottle without particular 
distinction among the rest. Lepidus, doctus, liberalise pro- 
bus, amicis jucundissimus — these are the titles selected for 
his epitaph by his sons Walter and Robert, both of them 
men exact in weighing words. Dr. Landor was twice mar- 
ried, first to a Miss Wright of Warwick, and after her 
death to Elizabeth Savage, of the AVarwickshire family 
of the Savages of Tachbrook. By his first wife he had 
six children, all of whom, however, died in infancy except 
one daughter. By his second wife he had three sons and 
four daughters ; and of this second family Walter Savage 
Landor was the eldest born. Both the first and the second 
wives of Dr. Landor were heiresses in their degree. The 
fortune of the first devolved by settlement upon her sur- 
viving daughter, who was in due time married to a cousin, 
Humphrey Arden of Longcroft. The family of the sec- 
ond, that of the Savages of Tachbrook, was of better cer* 



6 LANDOR. [chap. 

tificd antiquity and distinction than his own, though the 
proofs by which Walter Savage Lan dor used to associate 
with it certain historical personages bearing the same name 
were of a somewhat shadowy nature. The father of Eliza- 
beth Savage had been lineally the head of his house ; but 
the paternal inheritance which she divided with her three 
sisters was not considerable — the family estates having 
passed, it seems, into the hands of two of her grand- 
uncles, men of business in London. By these there was be- 
queathed to her, after her marriage with Dr. Landor, prop- 
erty to the value of nearly eighty thousand pounds, con- 
sisting of the two estates of Ipsley Court and Tachbrook 
in Warwickshire, the former on the borders of Worcester- 
shire, the latter close to Leamington, together with a share 
of the reversionary interest in a third estate — that of 
Hughenden Manor in Buckinghamshire — of which the 
name has since become familiar to us from other associ- 
ations. The Warwickshire properties thus left to Mrs. 
Landor, as well as Dr. Landor's own family property in 
Staffordshire, were strictly entailed upon the eldest male 
issue of the marriage ; so that to these united possessions 
Walter Savage Landor was born heir. 

No one, it should seem, ever entered life under happier 
conditions. To the gifts of breeding and of fortune there 
were added at his birth the gifts of genius and of strength. 
But there had been evil godmothers beside the cradle as 
well as good, and in the composition of this powerful nat- 
ure pride, anger, and precipitancy had been too largely 
mixed, to the prejudice of a noble intellect and tender 
heart, and to the disturbance of all his relations with his 
fellow-men. Of his childhood no minute record has come 
down to us. It seems to have been marked by neither 
the precocities nor the infirmities of genius. Indeed, al- 



I.] BIRTH AND PARENTAGE. 7 

though in after-life Landor used often to complain of ail- 
ments, of serious infirmities he knew little all his days. 
His mother, whose love for her children was solicitous and 
prudent rather than passionate or very tender, only once 
had occasion for anxiety as to the health of her eldest born. 
This was when he was seized, in his twelfth year, with a 
violent attack, not of any childish malady, but of gout ; 
an attack which the boy endured, it is said, with clamor- 
ous resentment and impatience; and which never after- 
wards returned. 

He had been sent as a child of only four-and-a-half to 
a school at Knowle, ten miles from home. Here he stayed 
five years or more, until he was old enough to go to Rug- 
by. His holidays were spent between his father's profes- 
sional abode in the town of Warwick and one or other 
of the two country houses on the Savage estates — Ipsley 
Court and Tachbrook. To these homes of his boyhood 
Landor was accustomed all his life to look back with the 
most affectionate remembrance. He had a retentive mem- 
ory for places, and a great love of trees and flowers. The 
mulberries, cedars, and fig-trees of the Warwick garden, 
the nut-walk and apricots of Tachbrook, afforded him joys 
which he never afterwards forgot. Of Warwick he writes, 
in his seventy-eighth year, that he has just picked up from 
the gravel walk the two first mulberries that have fallen, a 
thing he remembers having done just seventy years before ; 
and of Tachbrook, in his seventy-seventh, " Well do I re- 
member it from my third or fourth year ; and the red fil- 
bert at the top of the garden, and the apricots from the 
barn wall, and Aunt Nancy cracking the stones for me. 
If I should ever eat apricots with you again, I shall not 
now cry for the kernel." For Ipsley and its encircling 
stream the pleasantest expression of Landor's affection is 



8 LANDOK. [chap. 

contained in some unpublished verses, which may find their 
place here, although they refer to a later period of his 
youth : 

" I hope in vain to see again 
Ipsley's peninsular domain. 
In youth 'twas there I used to scare 

A whirring bird or scampering hare, 
And leave my book within a nook 

Where alders lean above the brook, 
To walk beyond the third mill-pond. 
And meet a maiden, fair and fond, 
Expecting me beneath a tree 

Of shade for two but not for three. 
Ah ! my old yew, far out of view. 
Why must I bid you both adieu ?" 

This love of trees, flowers, and places, went along in the 
boy with a love of books. He was proficient in school 
exercises, all except arithmetic, an art which, " according 
to the method in use," he never succeeded in mastering. 
At Rugby, where he went at ten, he was soon among the 
best Latin scholars; and he has recorded his delight over 
the first purchase of English books he made with his own 
money ; the books in question being Drayton's Polyolhion 
and Baker's Chronicle. He tells elsewhere how the writer 
who first awoke in him the love of poetry was Cowper. 
He seems from the first to have been a greedy reader, even 
to the injury of his power of sleep. " I do not remem- 
ber," he writes among his unpublished jottings, " that I 
ever slept five hours consecutively, rarely four, even in 
boyhood. I was much of a reader of night, and was once 
flogged for sleeping at the evening lesson, which I had 
learnt, but having mastered it, I dozed." 

This bookish boy was at the same time physically strong 
and active, though not particularly dexterous. Dancing, 



I 



I.] SCHOOL. 9 

to his own great chagrin, he could never learn, and on 
horseback his head was too full of thoughts to allow him 
much to mind his riding. At boxing, cricket, and foot- 
ball he could hold his own well. But the sport he loved 
was fishing with a cast-net ; at this he was really skilful, 
and apt in the pursuit to break bounds and get into trou- 
ble. One day he was reported for having flung his net 
over, and victoriously held captive, a farmer who tried to 
interfere with his pastime ; another day, for having ex- 
torted a nominal permission to fish where he had no sort 
of business from a passing batcher, who had no sort of 
authority to give it. A fag, whose unlucky star he had 
chosen all one afternoon to regard as the cause of his bad 
sport, remembered all his life Landor's sudden change of 
demeanour, and his own poignant relief, when the taking of 
a big fish convinced him that the said star was not unlucky 
after all. Like many imaginative boys to whose summer 
musings the pools and shallows of English lowland streams 
have seemed as full of romance as Eurotas or Scamander, 
he loved nothing so well as to wander by the brook-side, 
sometimes with a sporting, but sometimes also with a 
studious intent. He recalls these pleasures in a retrospec- 
tive poem of his later years. On Swift joining Avon near 
Rugby*: 

" In youth how often at thy side I wander'd ; 
What golden hours, hours numberless, were squander'd 

Among thy sedges, while sometimes 

I meditated native rhymes, 
And sometimes stumbled upon Latian feet ; 

There, where soft mole-built seat 

Invited me, I noted down 

What must full surely win the crown ; 
But first impatiently vain efforts made 
On broken pencil with a broken blade." 



10 LANDOR. [chap. 

Again, one of the most happily turned of all Landor's^ 
Latin poems expresses his regret that his eldest son, born 
in Ital}^, will never learn to know and love the English 
streams which had been the delight of his own youth. 
And once more, he records how the subject of that most 
perfect of dramatic dialogues, Leofric and Godiva, had 
first occupied him as a boy. He had written a little poem 
on the subject as he sat by the square pool at Rugby — 
" May the peppermint still be growing on the bank in that 
place !" — and he remembers the immoderate laughter with 
which his attempt was received by the friend to whom he 
confided it, and his own earnestness in beseeching that 
friend not to tell the lads — " so heart-strickenly and des- 
perately was I ashamed." 

Landor, it thus appears, had acquired in his earliest 
school days the power and the habit, which remained with 
him until almost the hour of his death, of writing, verses 
for his own pleasure both in Latin and English. As re- 
gards Latin, he is the one known instance in which the 
traditional classical education of our schools took full 
effect, and was carried out to its furthest practical conse- 
quences. Not only did Latin become in boyhood and 
remain to the last a second mother tongue to him ; his 
ideal of behaviour at the same time modelled itself on the 
ancient Roman, and that not alone in things convenient. 
Not content with taking Cato or Scipio or Brutus for his 
examples, when he was offended he instinctively betook 
himself to the weapons of Catulhis and Martial. Now a 
schoolboy's alcaics and hendecasyllabics may be never so 
well turned, but if their substance is both coarse and sav- 
age, and if moreover they are directed against that school- 
boy's master, the result can hardly be to his advantage. 
And thus it fell out with Landor. He might easily have 



I.] SCHOOL. . 11 

been the pride of the school, for whatever were his faults 
of temper, his brilliant scholarship could not fail to recom- 
mend him to his teachers, nor his ready kindness towards 
the weak, his high spirit and sense of honour to his com- 
panions. He was pugnacious, but only against the strong. 
" You remember," he writes, in some verses addressed 
seventy years later to an old school companion — 

" You remember that I fought 
Never with any but an older lad, 
And never lost but two fights in thirteen." 

Neither would it much have stood in Landor's way that 
his lofty ideas of what was due to himself made him re- 
fuse, at school as afterwards, to compete against others 
for prizes or distinctions of any kind. What did stand 
in his way was his hot and resentful impatience alike of 
contradiction and of authority. Each half-holiday of the 
school was by a customary fiction supposed to be given 
as a reward for the copy of verses declared to be the best 
of the day, and, with or without reason, Landor conceived 
that the head master — Dr. James — had systematically 
grudged this recognition to verses of his. When at last 
play-day was given for a copy of Landor's, the boy added 
in transcribing it a rude postscript, to the effect that it 
was the worst he had ever written. In other controver- 
sies that from time to time occurred between master and 
scholar, there were not wanting kindlier and more humor- 
ous passages than this. But at last there arose a quarrel 
over a Latin quantity, in which Landor was quite right at 
the outset, but by his impracticable violence put himself 
hopelessly in the wrong — complicating matters not only 
with fierce retorts, but with such verses as made authority's 
very hair stand on end. This was in his sixteenth year, 



12 LANDOR. [chap. 

when he was within five of being head of the school. 
The upshot was that the head master wrote to Dr. Landor, 
with many expressions of regret, requesting that his son 
Walter might be removed, lest he should find himself un- 
der the necessity of expelling him as one not only rebel- 
lious himself, but a promoter of rebellion in others. 
. Signs of the same defiant spirit had not been wanting 
in his home life. The seeds seeiii to have been already 
sown of an estrangement, never afterwards altogether 
healed, between himself and his father. In politics Dr. 
Landor had been originally a zealous Whig; but he was 
one of those Whigs for whom the French Revolution was 
too much. During that crisis he was swept along the 
stream of alarm and indignation w^hich found both voice 
and nourishment in the furious eloquence of Burke ; and 
when the party at last broke in two he went with those 
who deserted Fox and became the fervent followers of 
Pitt. The boyish politics of young Landor were of a very 
different stamp. He was already, what he remained to 
the end of his days, an ardent republican and foe to kings. 
The French Revolution had little to do with making or 
unmaking his sentiments on these points. His earliest 
admiration was for Washington, his earliest and fiercest 
aversion for Greorge HL And he had no idea of keeping 
his opinions to himself, but would insist on broaching 
them, nt) matter what the place or company. The young 
rebel one day cried out in his mother's room that he wish- 
ed the French would invade England, and assist us in 
hanging George the Third between two such rascals as the 
Archbishops of Canterbury and York ; whereupon that ex- 
cellent lady was seen to rise, box his ears from behind his 
chair, and then hastily make off upon her high-heeled shoes 
for fear of consequences. Again, we hear of his flinging 



I.] SCHOOL. 13 

an impetuous taunt across the table at a bishop who was 
dining w^ith his father, and who had spoken sKghtingly of 
the scholarship of Porson. Nevertheless it must not be 
supposed that Landor, even in the rawest and most com- 
bative days of his youth, was at any time merely ill-condi- 
tioned in his behaviour. He was never without friends in 
whom the signs both of power and tenderness which broke 
through his unruly ways inspired the warmest interest and 
affection. Such friends included at this time the most 
promising of his schoolmates, more than one charming 
girl companion of his own family or their acquaintances, 
and several seniors of various orders and conditions. His 
principal school friends were Henry Cary, afterwards trans- 
lator of Dante, and Walter Birch, an accomplished scholar 
who became an Oxford tutor, and ended his days at a 
country living in Essex. Girls of his own age or older 
found something attractive in the proud and stubborn 
boy, who for all his awkwardness and headlong temper 
was chivalrous to them, could turn the prettiest verses, 
and no doubt even in speech showed already some rudi- 
ments of that genius for the art of compliment which dis- 
tinguished him beyond all men in later life. Thus we 
find him towards his twentieth year in the habit of receiv- 
ing from Dorothea Lyttelton, the beautiful orphan heiress 
of estates contiguous to his home, advice conveyed in 
terms betokening the closest intimacy and kindness. 
Among his elders he attached to himself as friends char- 
acters so opposite as " the elegant and generous Dr. 
Sleath," one of his Rugby masters, with whom he was 
never on any but the kindest terms; Mr. Parkhurst of 
Ripple, a country squire, and father of one of his school- 
mates; and the famous Dr. Parr, at that time and for 
many years perpetual curate of Hatton, near Warwick. 



14 LANDOR. [chap. 

This singular personage, in spite of many grotesque pom- 
j)osities of speech, and some of character, commanded re- 
spect alike by his learning and his love of liberty. He 
was a pillar of advanced Whig opinions, and a friend of 
most of the chief men of that party. To the study where 
Parr lived ensconced with his legendary wig and pipe, and 
whence, in the lisping utterance that suited so quaintly 
with his sesquipedalian vocabulary, he fulminated against 
Pitt and laid down the law on Latin from amid piles of 
books and clouds of tobacco - smoke, the young Landor 
was wont to resort in search of company more congenial 
than that of the orthodox clergy and la>vyers who fre- 
quented his father's house. 

In speaking of these friendships of Landor's youth we 
have somewhat anticipated the order of events. To return 
to the date of his removal from Rugby : he was next 
placed under the charge of a Dr. Langley, at the village, 
celebrated for the charms of its scenery, of Ashbourne, in 
Derbyshire. Here again he showed how strong an at- 
tachment he was capable of inspiring in, and returning 
towards, a gentle and friendly senior. In his dialogue 
of Izaak Walton, Cotton, and Oldways, Dr. Langley is im- 
mortalized in the character of the " good parson of Ash- 
bourne ;" " he wants nothing, yet he keeps the grammar 
school, and is read}'^ to receive as private tutor any young 
gentleman in preparation for Oxford or Cambridge, but 
only one. They live like princes, converse like friends, 
and part like lovers." In a note to the same dialogue, as 
well as several times elsewhere, Landor explicitly declares 
his gratitude for the "parental kindness" of Dr. Langley 
and his wife, as also that which he bore all his life to two 
others "of his teachers, the above mentioned Dr. Sleath at 
Rugby, and " the saintly Benvvell " at Oxford. 



I.] COLLEGE. 15 

In this kind household Landor passed nearly two years. 
In Latin it appears that he had not much to learn from 
the good vicar, but he turned his time to account in read- 
ing the Greek writers, especially Sophocles and Pindar, 
in translating some of Buchanan into English, and some 
of Cowley into Latin verse, besides other poetical efforts 
in both languages. His English verses at this time show 
him not yet emancipated from the established precedents 
of the eighteenth century. It is not until a year or two 
later that we find him abandoning, in narrative poetry, the 
trim monotony of the rhyming couplet for a blank verse 
of more massive structure and statelier march than any 
which had been written since Milton. 

At eighteen Landor left Ashbourne and went into resi- 
dence at Trinity College, Oxford. His abilities made their 
impression at the university in spite of himself ; but he 
still would not be persuaded to compete for any sort of 
distinction. " I showed my compositions to Birch of 
Magdalen, my old friend at Rugby, and to Cary, translator 
of Dante, and to none else." Landor's reputation for 
talents which he would not put forth was accompanied 
by a reputation for opinions which he would not conceal. 
The agitation of political parties was at its height. The 
latter course of the Revolution had alienated the majority 
even of those who had sympathized with it at first, and 
the few Englishmen who did not share the general horror 
were marked men. Among those few there w-ere at Ox- 
ford in these days two undergraduates, SoutKey of Balliol, 
and Landor of Trinity. The two were not known to each 
other until afterwards; but they both made themselves 
conspicuous by appearing in hall and elsewhere with their 
hair unpowdered, a fashion which about 1793 — 1794 was 
a direct advertisement of revolutionary sentiments. " Take 



16 LANDOR. [chap. 

care," said Landor's tutor to bim ; " they will stone you 
for a republican." No such consequences in fact resulted, 
but Landor became notorious in the university. He was 
known not only as a Jacobin, but as a " mad Jacobin." 
*' His Jacobinism," says Sonthey, looking back to his own 
feelings in those days, " would have made me seek his ac- 
quaintance, but for his madness." The impression thus 
left on Southey's mind was probably due less to the 
warmth of Landor's revolutionary sentiments and lan- 
guage, than to the notoriety of the freak which, before 
long, brought him for the second time into violent and fu- 
tile collision with authority. One evening he invited his 
friends to wine. He had been out shooting in the morn- 
ing, and had his gun, powder, and shot in the next room. 
Opposite were the rooms of a Tory undergraduate, " a 
man," according to Landor's account, " universally laughed 
at and despised ; and it unfortunately happened that he 
had a party on the same day, consisting of servitors and 
other raffs of every description." The two parties began 
exchanging taunts ; then those opposite closed the shut- 
ters, and being on the outside, Landor proposed, by way of 
a practical joke, to send a charge of shot into them. His 
friends applauded, and he fired. The owner of the shut- 
ters naturally complained, and an inquiry was instituted 
to ascertain who was the offender. Landor's defiant mood 
at this point played him an ill turn, in that it prompted 
him, instead of frankly stating the facts, to refuse all in- 
formation. Part of his motive in this course, as he him- 
self afterwards explained, was his unwillingness to add to 
the causes of displeasure which he was conscious of having 
already given to his father. He could not have followed 
a more injudicious course. The president was compelled 
to push the inquiry and to inflict punishment. This he 



I.] COLLEGE. 17 

seems to have done as leniently and considerately as pos- 
sible; and when sentence of rustication was pronounced, 
it was with the expressed hope, on the part of all the col- 
lege authorities but one, that its victim would soon return 
to do them honour. Strangely enough, it seems also to 
have been hoped that a return to his home would bring 
about a better understanding between young Landor and 
his father. But so far from this being the case, his bear- 
ing after the freak, more even than the freak itself, to- 
gether with his subsequent step of giving up his college 
rooms, exasperated Dr. Landor ; passionate words were ex- 
changed; and the son turned his back on his father's 
house, as he declared and believed, " for ever." 
2 



CHAPTER II. 



EXPERIMENTS IN LIFE AND POETRY — GEBIR. 



[1794—1804.] 

From Warwick Lander went at first to London, where 
he took a lodging in Beaumont Street, Portland Place. 
Here he worked hard for several months at French and 
Italian, having formed the design of leaving England 
and taking up his abode in Italy. His Italian studies 
made him an ardent admirer of Alfieri, whom he always 
afterwards counted it an event to have met once at this 
time in a bookseller's shop. During these months he 
also brought out his first book, " The Poems of Walter 
Savage Landor ; printed for T. Cadell, jun. and W. Davies 
(successors to John Cadell) in the Strand, 1795." This 
small volume is now very rare, having been, like several 
of Landor's writings, withdrawn from sale by its author 
within a few weeks of publication. It contained a num- 
ber of poems and epigrams in English, besides a collection 
of Latin verses and a prose Defensio vindicating the use 
of that language by the moderns. The principal English 
pieces are a poem in three cantos on the Birth of Poesy ^ 
an Apology for Satire^ a tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, im- 
itated from Ovid, an Epistle of Abelard to Eloisa, all in 
the rhymed heroic couplet, an ode To Washington in the 
style of Gray, and a short poem in the metre since made 



CHAP. II.] EXPERIMENTS IN LIFE AND POETRY. 19 

popular by In Memoriam^ called French Villagers. Lan- 
dor already shows indications of a manner more vigorous 
and personal tban that of the current poetry of the day, 
but in diction as well as in the choice of metrical forms 
he is still under the rule of eighteenth century conven- 
tions, and writes of nymphs and swains, Bellona and the 
Zephyrs. At Oxford, where the rumour of his talents 
and the notoriety of his escapade were still fresh, his 
little volume seems to have made an impression, and to 
have been in demand as long as it remained in circulation. 
Another literary venture made by Landor during these 
months in London did not, like the last, bear his name. 
This was a satire against Pitt, in the form of a Moral 
Epistle in heroic verse, addressed to Earl Stanhope, with 
a prose preface in which the republican poet condoles 
with the republican peer on his possession of hereditary 
honours. 

While the young Landor was thus engaged with poetry 
and politics in London, the good offices of friends, and 
foremost among them of the fair Dorothea Lyttelton and 
her uncles, had been employed in seeking to reconcile him 
with his family. Several propositions as to his future 
mode of life were successively made and dropped — one 
beino" that he should be offered a commission then va- 
cant in the Warwickshire Militia. This scheme, howev- 
er, never came to Landor's knowledge, having fallen to the 
ground when it was ascertained that the other gentlemen 
of the corps would resign rather than serve with a com- 
rade of his opinions. The arrangement ultimately made 
was that he should receive an allowance of a hundred and 
fifty pounds a year, and be free to live as he liked, it being 
understood that the idea of a retreat to Italy was given up, 
and that he was welcome to free quarters at his father's 



20 LANDOR. [chap. 

house whenever he pleased. If this allowance seems 
small, it must be remembered that Dr. Landor's family 
property in Staffordshire was worth something under a 
thousand pounds a year ; while there were six younger 
children for whom Mrs. Landor, her estates being strictly 
entailed upon her eldest son, held herself bound to make 
provision out of her income during her life. To her 
careful and impartial justice towards all her children there 
exists abundant testimony, including that of Walter him- 
self, whose feelings towards his mother were at all times 
those of unclouded gratitude and affection. 

Matters having been thus arranged, Landor left London, 
and, with the exception of occasional visits to his family, 
led during the next three years a life of seclusion in South 
"Wales. He took up his residence on the coast, of which 
the natural charms were not then defiled as they are now 
by the agglomerations and exhalations of the mining and 
smelting industries. Having his headquarters generally 
at Swansea, sometimes at Tenby, and sometimes taking 
excursions into remoter parts of the Principality, he filled 
the chief part of his time with strenuous reading and 
meditation. His reminiscences of the occupations of these 
days are preserved in sundry passages both of prose and 
rhyme. Thus, contrasting the tenour of his own youth 
with that of Moore's — 

*' Alone I spent my earlier hour, 
While thou wert in the roseate bower, 
And raised to thee was every eye, 
And every song won every sigh. 
One servant and one chest of books 
Follow'd me into mountain nooks, 
Where, shelter'd from the sun and breeze, 
Lay Pindar and Thucydides." 



IT.] EXPERIMENTS IN LIFE AND POETRY. , 21 

Among all the ancient and modern writers whom Landor- 
read and pondered at this time, those who had most share 
in forming his mind seem to have been Pindar and Milton. 
What he admired, he says, in Pindar, was his " proud 
complacency and scornful strength. If I could resemble 
him in nothing else, I was resolved to be as compendious 
and as exclusive." But the strongest spell was that laid 
upon him by Milton, for whom, alike as a poet, hero, and 
republican seer and prophet, he now first conceived the 
enthusiastic reverence which afterwards inspired some of 
his noblest writing. " My prejudices in favour of ancient 
literature began to wear away on reading Paradise Lost, 
and even the great hexameter sounded to me tinkling 
when I had recited aloud, in my solitary walks on the 
sea-shore, the haughty appeal of Satan and the repentance 
of Eve." Here, from a letter written long after to Lady 
Blessington, is another retrospective glimpse of his life in 
those days. " I lived," he writes, " chiefly among woods, 
which are now killed with copper works, and took my 
walks over sandy sea-coast deserts, then covered with low 
roses and thousands of nameless flowers and plants, trodden 
by the naked feet of the Welsh peasantry, and trackless. 
These creatures were somewhat between me and the ani- 
mals, and were as useful to the landscape as masses of 
weed or stranded boats." Never were his spirits better, 
he writes in the same connexion, although he did not 
exchange twelve sentences with men. 

It is clear that Landor here exaggerates in some degree 
the loneliness of his life. If he did not exchange twelve 
sentences with men, he at all events found occasion for 
more extended parley with the other sex. He was, in fact, 
by no means as much a stranger to the roseate bower as 
th(^ verses above quoted might lead us to suppose. Thes^ 



22 LANDOR. [chap. 

days of solitary rambles and higli communings, " Studies 
intense of strong and stern delight" — the line is his own 
— were also to. Landor days of romance. The earliest 
heroine of his devotions during his life in Wales was call- 
ed in the language of poetry lone, and in that of daily 
life Jones. To her succeeded, but without, it would seem, 
altogether supplanting her, a second and far more serious 
flame. This was a blithe Irish lady, who conceived a 
devoted passion for the haughty and studious youth, and 
whom her poet called lanthe. lanthe stands for Jane, 
and the full name of the lady was Sophia Jane Swift — af- 
terwards Countess de Molande. I find the history of these 
names lone and lanthe, which fill so considerable a place 
in Landor's early poetry, set down as follows in one of 
those autobiographical jottings in verse which he did not 
think it worth while to publish, but which are character- 
istic as illustrating his energetic and deliberate way of 
turning; trifles into verse : 

*' Sometimes, as boys will do, I play'd at love, 
Noi' feai"'d cold weather, nor withdrew in hot ; 
And two who were my playmates at that hour, 
Hearing me call'd a poet, in some doubt 
Challenged me to adapt their names to song, 
lone was the first ; her name is heard 
Among the hills of Cambria, north and south, 
But there of shorter stature, like herself ; 
I placed a comely vowel at its close, 
And drove an ugly sibilant away. 

***** 
lanthe, who came later, smiled and said, 
I have two names and will be praised hi both ; 
Sophia is not quite enough for me, 
And you have simply named it, and but once. 
Now call the other up — 

***** 



il] experiments in life and POETRr. 23 

I went, and planted in a fresh parterre 
lanthe ; it was blooming, when a youth 
Leapt o'er the hedge, and snatching at the stem 
Broke off the label from my favourite flower, 
And stuck it on a sorrier of his own." 

The sally in the last lines is curious. Both Shelley and 
Byron have made English readers familiar with the name 
lanthe. So far as I can learn, it had not appeared in 
English poetry at all until it was introduced by Landor, 
except in Dryden's translation of the story of Iphis and 
lanthe from Ovid. It was in 1813 that both Byron chose 
it as a fancy name for Lady Ann Harley, in the dedica- 
tion of Childe Harold, and Shelley as a real name to be 
given to his infant daughter. The "youth" of the above 
extract can hardly be any other than Byron, whom Landor 
neither liked nor much admired, and whom he considered, 
as we thus perceive, to have borrowed this beautiful name 
lanthe from his own early poetry. 

Upon the whole, the life led by Landor at twenty, and 
for the years next following, was one well suited to the 
training of a poet. He nourished his mind resolutely 
upon the noblest sustenance, making his own all that was 
best in the literatures of ancient and modern Europe — ex- 
cept, indeed, in the literature of Germany, which had been 
then barely discovered in England by a few explorers like 
Scott, Coleridge, and William Taylor of Norwich, and to 
which Landor neither now nor afterwards felt himself at- 
tracted. He haunted, moreover, with the keenest enjoy- 
ment of its scenery, a region hardly less romantic or less 
impressive than that which was inspiring at the same time 
the youth of Wordsworth. If he was inclined to trifle 
with the most serious of things, love, that is a fault by 
which the quality of a man's life suffers, but not neces- 



24 LAXDOR. [chap. 

sarily the quality of his song ; and experiences both more 
transient and more reckless than his have made of a 
Burns or a Heine the exponents of the passion for all 
generations. 

Landor, however, was not destined to be one of the 
master poets either of nature, like Wordsworth, or of pas- 
sion, like Burns or Heine. All his life he gave proof, in 
poetry, of remarkable and versatile capacity, but of no 
overmastering vocation. So little sure, indeed, in youth 
was he of his own vocation, that his first important poem, 
Gehir, was suggested by an accident and prefaced with an 
apology. The history of Gehir is this : Landor had made 
friends at Tenby with the family of Lord Aylmer, and 
one of the young ladies of that family, his especial and 
close friend Rose Aylmer, lent him a history of romance 
by one Clara Reeve. At the end of this book he found 
a sketch of a tale, nominally Arabian, which struck his 
imagination as having in it something of a shadowy, 
antique grandeur — magnificum quid sub crepusculo anti- 
quitatis, as he afterwards defined the quality — and out of 
which he presently constructed the following story : Gebir 
(whence Gibraltar), a prince of Spain, in fulfilment of a 
vow binding him to avenge hereditary wrongs, makes war 
against Charoba, a young queen of Egypt, Charoba seeks 
counsel of her nurse, the sorceress Dalica, who devises suc- 
cour through her magic arts. An interview next takes 
place between Charoba and the invader, v^hen their enmity 
changes into mutual love. Gebir hereupon directs his 
army to restore and colonize a ruined city which had been 
founded in the country of Charoba by one of his ances- 
tors ; and the work is begun and carried on until it is sud- 
denly undone by magic. Meanwhile the brother of Gebir, 
Tamar, a shepherd-prince, whose task it is to tend thX) 



II.] GEBIR. 25 

flocks of the invading host, has in his turn fallen in love 
with an ocean nymph, who had encountered and beaten 
him in wrestling. Gebir persuades Tamar to let him try 
a fall with the nymph, and throwing her, learns from her, 
first promising that she shall have the hand of Tamar for 
her reward, the rites to be performed in order that his 
city may rise unimpeded. In the fulfilment of these rites 
Gebir visits- the under-world, and beholds the shades of 
his ancestors. After his return it is agreed that he shall 
be wedded to Charoba. Tamar also and his nymph are 
to be united ; their marriage takes place first, and the 
nymph, warning her husband of calamities about to befall 
in Egypt, persuades him to depart with her, and after 
leading him in review past all the shores of the Mediter- 
ranean, unfolds to him a vision of the glory awaiting his 
descendants in the lands between the Rhine and the 
Garonne. Then follows the marriage of Gebir and Cha- 
roba, which they and their respective hosts intend to be 
the seal of a great reconciliation. But, inasmuch as 
"women communicate their fears more willingly than 
their love," Charoba has never avowed her change of heart 
to Dalica, who believes the marriage to be only a stratagem 
devised by the queen to get Gebir within her power. Ac- 
cordingly she gives the bridegroom, to put on during the 
ceremony, a poisoned garment which she has obtained 
from her sister, a .sorceress stronger than herself. The 
poison takes effect, and the poem ends with the death of 
Gebir in the arms of the despairing Charoba, and in view 
of the assembled hosts. 

Such is the plot, shadowy in truth and somewhat cha- 
otic, of Landor's first considerable poem. In his preface 
he declares the work to be " the fruit of Idleness and Ig- 
norance; for had I been a botanist or a mineralogist, it 
C 2* 



26 LANDOR. [chap. 



had never been written." We ouglit, however, to qualify 
these careless words of the preface, by remembering those 
of the poem itself, in which he invokes the spirit of Shak 
speare, and tells how — 



panting in the play-hour of my youth, 

I drank of Avon, too, a dangerous draught 
That roused within the feverish thirst of song." 



4 



Having determined to write Gebir, Landor hesitated for 
some time whether to do so in Latin or in English, and 
had even composed some portions in the former language 
before he finally decided in favour of the latter. And 
then, when he had written his first draft of the poem in 
English, he lost the manuscript, and only recovered it after 
a considerable time. Here is his account of the matter as 
he recollected it in old age : 

" Sixty the years since Fidler bore 
My grouse-bag up the Bala moor ; 
Above the lakes, along the lea, 
Where gleams the darkly yellow Dee ; 
Through crags, o'er cliffs, I carried there 
My verses with paternal care. 
But left them, and went home again 
To wing the birds upon the plain. 
With heavier luggage half forgot, 
For many months they follow'd not. 
When over Tawey's sands they came, 
Brighter flew up my winter flame,- 
And each old cricket sang alert 
With joy that they had come unhurt." 

When he had recovered the manuscript of his poem, 
Landor next proceeded to condense it. He cuts out, he 
tells us, nearly half of what he had written. The poem 
as so abridged is, for its length, probably the most " com- 
pendious and exclusive" which exists. The narrative is 



II.] GEBIR. 27 

packed into a space where it has no room to develope it- 
self at ease. The transitions from one theme to another 
are effected with more than Pindaric abruptness, and the 
difficulty of the poem is further increased by the occur- 
rence of grammatical constructions borrowed from the 
Latin, and scarcely intelligible to those ignorant of that 
language. It is only after considerable study that the 
reader succeeds in taking in Gebir as a whole, however 
much he may from the first be impressed by the power of 
particular passages. Next to the abruptness and the con- 
densation of Gebir, its most striking qualities are breadth 
and vividness of imagination. Taken severally, and with- 
out regard to their sequence and connexion, these colossal 
figures and supernatural actions are presented with master- 
ly reality and force. As regards style and language, Lan- 
dor shows that he has not been studying the great masters 
in vain. He has discarded Bellona and the Zephyrs, and 
calls things by their proper names, admitting no height- 
ening of language that is not the natural expression of 
heightened thought. For loftiness of thought and lan- 
guage together, there are passages in Gehir that will bear 
comparison with Milton. There are lines too that for 
majesty of rhythm will bear the same comparison ; but 
majestic as Landor's blank verse often is, it is always too 
regular; it exhibits none of the Miltonic variety, none of 
the inventions in violation or suspension of ordinary met- 
rical law, by which that great master draws unexampled 
tones from his instrument. 

Here, indeed, was a contrast to the fashionable poetry 
of the hour, to the dulcet inanities of Hayley and of Miss 
Seward. Gehir appeared just at the mid -point of time 
between the complaint of Blake concerning the truancy of 
the Muses from England, 



28 LANDOR. [chap. 

" The languid strings do scarcely move, 
The sound is forced, the notes are few," 

and the thanksgiving of Keats, 

" fine sounds are floating; wild 



About the earth." 

Of the fine sounds that heralded to modern ears the re- 
vival of English poetry, Gehir will always remain for stu- 
dents one of the most distinctive. The Lyrical Ballads, 
the joint venture of Coleridge and Wordsworth, which ap- 
peared in the same year as Gehir, began with the Ancient 
Mariner, a work of even more vivid and haunting, if also 
more unearthly, imagery, and ended with the Lines writ- 
ten on revisiting Tintern Abbey, which conveyed the first 
notes of a far deeper spiritual message. But nowhere in 
the works of Wordsworth or Coleridge do we find any- 
thing resembling Landor's peculiar qualities of haughty 
splendour and massive concentration. The message, such 
as it is, of Gebir is mainly political and philanthropic. 
The tragic end of the hero and his bride is designed to 
point a moral against the enterprises of hatred and ambi- 
tion, the happy fates of Tamar and the nymph to illus- 
trate the reward that awaits the peaceful. The progeny 
whom the latter pair see in a vision celebrating the tri- 
umphs of liberty are intended to symbolize the people of 
revolutionary France. The passage describing their fes- 
tivity, cancelled in subsequent editions, is one of the best 
in the original poem, and its concluding image may serve 
to illustrate both the style and the versification of Gebir 
at least as well as other passages more commonly quoted, 
like the shell, the meeting of the prince and Charoba, or 
the bath of Charoba. 



II.] GEBIR. 29 

*' What hoary form so vigorous vast bends here ? 
Time, Time himself thi-ows off his motley garb, 
Figured with monstrous men and monstrous gods, 
And in pure vesture enters their pure fanes, 
A proud partaker of their festivals. 
Captivity led captive, war o'erthrown. 
They shall o'er Europe, shall o'er earth extend 
Empire that seas alone and skies confine. 
And glory that shall strike the crystal stars," 

In the same spirit Buonaparte is included among the de- 
scendants of Tamar, and his birth foreshadowed as that of 

"A mortal man above all mortal praise." 

On the other hand George III. is introduced, with a lordly 
neglect of the considerations of time and space, among the 
ancestors of G-ebir suffering the penalty of their crimes 
in the nether regions. "Aroar," cries the prince to his 
guide — 

" Aroar, what wretch that nearest us ? What wretch 
Is that with eyebrows white, and slanting brow ?" 

(In conversation, it may be mentioned, Landor had an- 
other formula for expressing his aversion for the physical 
appearance of his sovereign. He had only seen him once, 
and " his eyes," he was accustomed to say — " his eyes 
looked as if they had been cut out of a vulture's gizzard.") 
In taking leave of Gehir^ let us only note farther the per- 
sonal allusions which it contains in two passages to Lan- 
dor's relations with his lone. One is a direct apostrophe 
in which he celebrates her beauties; her cheeks, her tena- 
ples, her lips, her eyes, her throat, which he calls love's 
column 

" Marmoreal, trophied round with golden hair." 



80 LANDOR. [chap. 

In the other passage she is introduced among the choir of 
nymphs attendant upon the bride of Taraar : 

" Scarce the sweet-flowing music he imbibes, 
Or sees the peopled Ocean ; scarce he sees 
Spio with sparkhng eyes, or Beroe 
Demure, and young lone, less renown'd. 
Not less divine, mild-natured. Beauty form'd 
Her face, her heart Fidelity ; for gods 
Design'd a mortal, too, lone loved." 

Landor was at all times sensible enough of the differ- 
ence between his own marble and other men's stucco ; and 
he expected great things of Gebir. At the same time, lie 
published it in the manner least likely to ensure success, 
that is anonymously, and in pamphlet shape, through a 
local publisher at Warwick. Considering the reception 
given twenty years afterwards to the poetry of Keats and 
Shelley, it is no wonder that Gehir was neglected. The 
poem found, indeed, one admirer, and that was Southey, 
who read it with enthusiasm, recommended it in speech 
and writing to his friends, Cobbe, William Taylor, Gros- 
venor Bedford, the Hebers, and in the year following its 
publication (1799) called public attention to it in the 
pages of the Critical Review. Another distinguished ad- 
mirer, of some years later date, was De Quincey, who was 
accustomed to profess — although Landor scouted the pro- 
fession — that he also had for some time " conceited him- 
self " to be the sole purchaser and appreciater of Gehir. 
Southey's praise in the Critical Review was soon balanced 
by a disparaging article in the Monthly, in which the 
anonymous author was charged, among other things, with 
having too closely imitated Milton. To this Landor pre- 
pared a reply, written, to judge by the specimens given in 
Forster's Life, in just the same solid, masculine, clenching 



II.] EXPERIMENTS IN LIFE AND POETRY. 81 

style with which we are famihar in his later prose, but 
withheld from publication in deference to the judicious 
advice of a friend. 

Whether the scant success of his poem really had any- 
thing to do with the restlessness of Landor's life and the 
desultoriness of his efforts during the next few years, we 
can hardly tell. He says himself, in his lofty way, that if 
even foolish men had cared for Gebir, he should have con- 
tinued to apply himself to poetry, since " there is some- 
thing of summer in the hum of insects." As it was he 
allowed himself to drift. He began to diversify his exile 
with frequent and prolonged visits to Bath, London, Brigh- 
ton. He tried his powers fitfully in many directions. Dr. 
Parr was eager to enlist his young friend in the ranks of 
Whig journalism, and persuaded him to place himself in 
relations with Robert Adair, the right-hand man in these 
matters of Charles James Fox; under whose guidance Lan- 
dor became for a while a frequenter of the reporter's gal- 
lery, a contributor to the Courier, and a butt for the at- 
tacks of the Anti-Jacobin. In scorn and denunciation of 
" the Execrable " — that is to say, of Pitt and of his policy 
— Landor could be trusted not to fail; bat in support of 
Fox and his, it was unsafe to count upon him too far. He 
was not, indeed, of the stuff of which practically effective 
political writers are made. While he despised party watch- 
words and party men, his temperament was not dispassion- 
ate enough for wise neutrality. His political writings, as 
we shall see, testify to a staunch and high devotion to the 
great principles of freedom and of justice, as well as to a 
just observation of many of the broad facts of politics 
and society. But in dealing with individual problems a,nd 
persons Landor knows no measure, and is capable neither 
of allowance nor abatement. In his eyes all champions of 



32 



LANDOR. 



liberty are for the time being spotless heroes ; nearly all 
kings, tyrants to be removed by the dagger or the rope; 
and, with a few shining exceptions, most practical politi- 
cians knaves and fools. 

How long Landor's connexion with the Courier lasted 
does not appear; but it was, at any rate, not terminated till 
the resignation of Pitt, and the formation of the Adding- 
ton Ministry in 1801. This event exasperated the Whig 
party, and especially Parr, whose correspondence with Lan- 
dor at this time consists of pompous and elaborate dia- 
tribes, the substance of which he entreats his young friend 
to recast for publication in the party sheet. Then ensued 
the peace of Luneville; and in the next year, 1802, the 
peace of Amiens. Landor, like all the world, took the op- 
portunity to visit Paris ; but, like himself, declined to ac- 
cept introductions or to pay any kind of personal homage 
to the victorious Consul or to his ministers. His, at least, 
was not one among the feeble heads, to slavery prone, 
upon which Wordsworth poured scorn on the same occa- 
sion. Landor travelled alone, made his own observations 
on the people and the country ; witnessed, from the illu- 
minated garden of the Tuileries, the young conqueror's re- 
ception by the multitude when he appeared at the window 
of the palace, and contrived, in the great review afterwards, 
to get a place within a few feet of him as he rode by. Of 
all this Landor wrote fully and unaffectedly at the time in 
letters, which have been preserved, to his sisters and broth- 
ers. Here, written ten years afterwards, and coloured by 
a certain measure of deliberate and, in truth, somewhat 
over-magniloquent rhetoric, is his account of the reflexions 
to which another incident of his Paris trip gave rise ; I 
mean his visit to the spoils of art there collected in the 
Louvre from the churches and galleries of Italy and of all 



II.] EXPERIMENTS IN LIFE AND POETRY. ^ 33 

Europe. " I went," he says, " with impatient haste to be- 
hold these wonders of their age and of all ages succeed- 
ing, but no sooner had I ascended a few steps leading to 
them than I leaned back involuntarily against the balus- 
ters, and my mind was overshadowed and almost overpow- 
ered by these reflections : has then the stupidity of men 
who could not, in the whole course of their existence, have 
given birth to anything equal to the smallest of the works 
above, been the cause of their removal from the countiy 
of those who produced them? Kings, whose fatuity would 
have befitted them better to drive a herd of swine than to 
direct the energies of a nation ! Well, well ! I will lose 
for a moment the memory of their works in contemplat- 
ing those of greater men." 

The events of the last five years had had no more effect 
than those of the five preceding them in modifying the 
essential points of Landor's political creed. The portents 
of the Directory and Consulate had no more been able 
than the orgies of the Terror to disgust him with repub- 
licanism or to reconcile him to monarchy. He had shared, 
indeed, the chagrin and reprobation with which all friends 
of liberty looked on the subversion by revolutionary 
France, now that she was transformed into a conquering 
power, of ancient liberties outside her borders. But it 
was France only, and not the Revolution, that Landor held 
guilty. He had by this time conceived for that country 
and its inhabitants an aversion in which he never after- 
wards wavered. "A scoundrel of a Frenchman — tautology 
quantum scoundrel — did so and so," he wrote once to 
Hare, and the words convey his sentiments on the subject 
in a nutshell. The French are for him henceforward the 
most ferocious, the most inconstant, the most ungoverna- 
ble of human beings. "As to the cause of liberty," he 



34 LANDOR. [chap. 

writes from Paris to his brother in 1802, "this cursed na- 
tion has ruined it for ever." The fault in his eyes is not 
nearly so much that of their new master as their own. 
Buonaparte is indeed no longer for Landor the mortal man 
above all mortal praise of Gehir, any more than the French 
people are the peaceful progeny of Tamar ; but he is the 
best ruler for such a race. "Doubtless the government 
of Buonaparte is the best that can be contrived for French- 
men. Monkeys must be chained, though it may cost them 
some grimaces." And again, reiterating the same idea 
more gravely ten years afterwards, Landor writes: "No 
people is so incapable of governing itself as the French, 
and no government is so proper for it as a despotic and 
a military one. A nation more restless and rapacious 
than any horde in Tartary can be controlled only by a 
Ghenghiz Khan. . . . Their emperor has acted towards 
them with perfect wisdom, and will leave to some future 
Machiavelli, if Europe should again see so consummate a 
politician, a name which may be added to Agathocles and 
Caesar Borgia. He has amused himself with a display of 
every character from Masaniello up to Charlemagne, but 
in all his pranks and vagaries he has kept one foot upon 
Frenchmen." 

This whimsical energy of dislike extends from the po- 
litical to the private characteristics of the French ; to their 
looks, their voices and manners, and even to the scenery 
and climate of their country. " Of all the coasts," it is 
declared in one of his dialogues — " of all the coasts in the 
universe, of the same extent, those of France for nearly 
their totality in three seas are the least beautiful and the 
least interesting." " The children, the dogs, the frogs, are 
more clamorous than ours; the cocks are shriller." The 
language of the French, as a language, Landor also thinks 



II.] EXPERIMENTS IN LIFE AND POETRY. 35 

deplorable ; but he is too good a judge of letters to extend 
his contempt to their writings. He was solidly and fa- 
miliarly versed in the great French writers from Montaigne 
and Rabelais down, and though he did scant justice to 
Voltaire, and saw the weakness rather than the strength 
of the French poetical drama, he thought many of their 
prose writers second only, if second at all, to the best of 
antiquity. The style of Rousseau in particular he thought 
incomparable. He held also in high admiration the great 
French oratorical divines, and felt and valued to the full 
the combined pregnancy and simplicity of thought and 
utterance which distinguish those two pre-eminent classics 
in verse and prose respectively, La Fontaine and Pascal. 
"Do we find in Pascal anything of the lying, gasconading, 
vapouring Frenchmen ? On the contrary, we find, in de- 
spite of the most miserable language, all the sober and re- 
tired graces of style, all the confident ease of manliness 
and strength, with an honest but not abrupt simplicity 
which appeals to the reason, but is also admitted to the 
heart." 

To return to the history of Landor's occupations, in 
1800 he had published, in the shape of an unbound quarto 
pamphlet of fourteen pages, a collection of short " Poems 
from the Arabic and Persian," written in irregular, un- 
rhyraed verses, principally anapaestic. An autograph note 
added in old age to his own copy says, " I wrote these 
poems after reading what had been translated from the 
Arabic and Persian by Sir W. Jones and Dr. Nott." In 
his preface Landor professes to have followed a French 
version of the originals, but neither such version nor such 
originals are known to exist ; and it may be safely infer- 
red that both the statement of the preface and the elabo- 
rate notes appended to each poem are so much niystifica^ 



36 LANDOR. [chap. 

tion. The pamphlet is of extreme rarity, and its contents 
were not reprinted until 1858. I give, by way of exam- 
ple, the following characteristic and taking little piece with 
which it concludes : 

" Oh Rahdi, where is happiness ? 
Look from your arcade, the sun rises from Busrah ; 
Go thither, it rises from Ispahan. 
Alas ! it rises neither from Ispahan nor Busrah, 
But from an ocean impenetrable to the diver. 
Oh, Rahdi, the sun is happiness." 

To which Landor adds a note to say that " this poem re- 
sembles not those ridiculous quibbles which the English 
. in particular call epigrams, but rather, abating some little 
for Orientalism^ those exquisite Eidyllia, those carvings 
as it were on ivory or on gems, which are modestly called 
epigrams by the Greeks." 

This little publication, as was natural from its shape and 
character, attracted no attention, nor did Landor attempt 
anything in the same manner afterwards. Two years 
later, immediately before his expedition to Paris in 1802, 
he put forth another small volume under the title of 
"Poetry, by the author of Gebir." This contains two 
short narrative poems in blank verse — Chrysaor and the 
Phocceans, besides a few miscellaneous lyrics in Latin and 
English; Landor's mind was still occupied with the 
mythic past of Bsetic Spain ; and Chrysaor is an episode 
of the war between Gods and Titans, in which Gades 
(Cadiz) is severed from the mainland by Neptune at the 
request of Jove. Both in subject and in treatment it 
seems to foreshadow the Hyperion of Keats, except that 
the manner of the elder poet is more massive, more con- 
centrated, and proportionately less lucid than that of the 



u.] EXPERIMENTS IN LIFE AND POETRY. 37 

younger. To my mind Chrysaor is Landor's finest piece 
of narrative writing in l^lank verse ; less monotonous in 
its movement than Gehir, more lofty and impassioned than 
any of the later "Hellenics" with which it was afterwards 
incorporated. At the time of its publication this poem 
made a deep impression upon Wordsworth.^ The Pho- 
cceans, on the other hand, which tells of the foundation of 
the colony of Massilia by emigrants of that race — a subject 
which had been in Landor's mind since Oxford days — is so 
fragmentary and so obscure as to baffle the most tenacious 
student. It contains, like all Landor's early poetry, im- 
ages both condensed and vivid, as well as weighty reflec- 
tions weightily expressed ; but in its sequence and inci- 
dents the poem is, to me at least, unintelligible. So at the 
time it seems to have been found by Southey, who has- 
tened to review this new publication by the unknown ob- 
ject of his previous enthusiasm, but could find little to say 
in its praise. 

Another task which occupied Landor at this time was 
the re-editing of Gehir^ in conjunction with his brother 
Robert, then at Oxford. In order to make the poem more 
popular, the brothers reprinted it with arguments and notes; 
some of the latter being intended to clear up difficulties, 
others to modify points concerning which, as for instance, 
the character of Buonaparte, the author had changed his 
mind. At the same time they published separately a Latin 
translation, which, together with a scholarly and vigorous 
preface in the same language, Walter had prepared express- 
ly at Robert's instigation by way of helping the piece into 

^ In the final collected edition of Landor's writings (ISYG) Chry- 
saor is inadvertently printed as part of the same poem with Regene- 
ration^ which was written twenty years later, and with which it hag 
nothing at all to do. 



38 LANDOR. [chap. 

popularity. These, it must be remembered, were the days 
of Vincent Bourne, Bobus Smith, Frere, Canning, and 
Wellesley, when the art of Latin versification was studied, 
practised, and enjoyed not in scholastic circles alone, but by a 
select public of the most distinguished Englishmen; so that 
there was not quite so much either of pedantry or of sim- 
plicity in the fraternal enterprise as appeared at first sight. 
At the end of the volume of " Poetry " published in 
1802 there had already appeared one or two lyrics refer- 
ring, though not yet under that name, to the lady whom 
Landor afterwards called lanthe. More were appended, 
and this time with the name, to yet another experimental 
scrap of a volume in verse, having for its chief feature a 
tale in eight - syllable rhyme called Gunlaug and Helga, 
suggested by Herbert's translation from the Icelandic. 
This appeared in 1804 or 1805, while Robert Landor was 
still at Oxford, and by him, if by no one else, was duti- 
fully reviewed in a periodical of his own creation, the Ox- 
ford Review. From these years, about 1802 — 1806, dates 
the chief part of Landor's verses written to or about lanthe. 
Whether in the form of praise, of complaint, or of appeal, 
these verses are for the most part general in their terms, 
and do not enable us definitely to retrace the course of an 
attachment on which Landor never ceased to look back as 
the strongest of his life, and for the object of which he 
continued until her death to entertain the most chivalrous 
and tender friendship. Landor's verses in this class, al- 
though not in the first rank of love -poetry, nevertheless 
express much contained passion in their grave, concise way, 
and seldom fail to include, within the polished shell of 
verse, a solid and appropriate kernel, however minute, of 
thought. Here, in a somewhat depressed and ominous key, 
is a good example of the style : 



II.] EXPERIMENTS IN LIFE AND POETRY. 39 

" I held her hand, the pledge of bliss, , 

Her hand that trembled and withdrew, 
She bent her head before my kiss — 
My heart was sure that hers was true. 

" Now I have told her I must part, 

She shakes my hand, she bids adieu, 
Nor shuns the kiss — alas, my heart ! 
Hers never was the heart for you." 

In other pieces we get a more outspoken tale of past de- 
lights and of the pain of present separation. The lady ■ 
went abroad, and the restlessness of Landor's life increased. 
He moved frequently between Wales, Bath, Clifton, War- 
wick, Oxford, and London. We find him in close corre- 
spondence, generally on subjects of literature or scholar 
ship, with his friends Gary and Birch. Another of his in- 
timate friends of the years just preceding these had been 
Rough, a young lawyer married to a daughter of Wilkes, 
and then of a shining promise which smouldered off later 
into disappointment and mediocrity. With him Landor 
on slight occasion or none had about this time one of his 
impulsive, irreconcilable quarrels. In the meantime his 
father's health was gradually and painfully breaking up. 
It was evident that Walter would soon come into posses- 
sion of the patrimonial portion of his inheritance. He did 
not wait that event to outrun his allowance. We find him 
buying a horse one day, a Titian another, a Hogarth on the 
third ; and generally beginning to assume the habits of a 
gentleman of property and taste. He was full at the same 
time of lofty schemes, literary and other. The expedition 
of the fleet under Nelson called forth some verses of which 
we cannot but regret the loss, and in which the writer 
seemed, to quote the friend to whom he addressed them, 



40 LANDOR. [chap. ii. 

"•to have been inspired by the prophetic spirit ascribed to 
the poets of old, and to have anticipated the glorious vic- 
tory of Nelson, the news of which had reached me just be- 
fore I received them." The victory in question was the 
battle of Trafalgar, and between the date of this letter, 
November 11, 1805, and Christmas of the same year. Dr. 
Landor had died, and Walter had come into possession of 
his patrimony. 



CHAPTER III. 

MORE EXPERIMENTS AND MARRIAGE BATH SPAIN 

LLANTHONY — COUNT JULIAN. 

[1805—1814.] 

As soon as he was his own master, Landor proceeded to 
enlarge his style of living in proportion to his increased 
means, or rather beyond such proportion as it turned out. 
He continued to make Bath his headquarters, and, exter- 
nally at least, lived there for some time the life of any oth- 
er young (although, indeed, he was not now so very young) 
Fortunio. His political opinions were a 'source of some 
scandal, and it was remarked that any other man talking 
as Landor talked would have been called to account for it 
over and over again. Once or twice, indeed, it seems as 
if collisions had only been averted by the good oflSces of 
friends ; but there was something about Landor which 
did not encourage challenge; partly, no doubt, his obvious 
intrepidity, and partly, we may infer, his habitual exact- 
ness on the point of personal courtesy even in the midst 
of his most startling sallies. Perhaps, too, republicanism 
seemed to lose something of its odiousness in a gentleman 
of Landor's known standing and fortune. Common re- 
port exaggerated at this time his wealth and his expecta- 
tions, and his own prodigality in the matter of horses, 
carriages, servants, plate, pictures, and the like, lent conn- 
D 3 



42 LANDOR. [chap. 

tenance to the exaggeration. In his personal habits, it 
must at the same time be noted, Landor was now, as al- 
ways, frugal. He drank water, or only the lightest wines, 
and ate fastidiously indeed, but sparely. All his life he 
would touch no viands but such as were both choice and 
choicely dressed, and he preferred to eat them alone, or 
in the company of one or two, regarding crowded repasts 
as fit only for savages. " To dine in company with more 
than two is a Gaulish and a German thing. I can hardly 
brino* myself to believe that I have eaten in concert with 
twenty ; so barbarous and herdlike a practice does it now 
appear to me, such an incentive to drink much and talk 
loosely — not to add, such a necessity to speak loud — - 
which is clownish and odious in the extreme." The 
speaker in the above passage is Lucullus, but the senti- 
ments are Landor's own. Neither does Landor seem at 
any time to have taken trouble about his dress ; having, 
indeed, in later life come to be conspicuously negligent 
in that particular. In these early Bath days we have to 
picture him to ourselves simply as a solid, massive, ener- 
getic presence, in society sometimes silent and abstracted, 
sometimes flaming with eloquence and indignation ; his 
figure robust and commanding, but not tall, his face prin- 
cipally noticeable for its bold, full, blue-grey eyes and 
strons", hiffh-arched brows, with dark hair fallinij* over 
and half concealing the forehead, and a long, stubborn 
upper lip, and aggressive set of the jaw, betokening truly 
enough the passionate temper of the man, yet in conver- 
sation readily breaking up into the sunniest, most genial 
smile. 

Such as he was, then, Landor was in high request for 
the time being in the assembly-rooms both of Bath and 
Clifton. These, no doubt, were the days in which, as he 



III.] BATH. 43 

wrote long afterwards to Lady Blessington, lie suffered so 
much annoyance from his bad dancing. "How grievous- 
ly has my heart ached," such is his large way of putting 
it, " when others were in the full enjoyment of that rec- 
reation which I had no right even to partake of." Nev- 
ertheless, Landor was kindly looked on by the fair, and 
only too impetuously ready to answer sigh with sigh. 
His flirtations were numerous and were carried far. There 
is even not wanting, in his dealings with and his language 
concerning women during this brief period, a touch of 
commonplace rakishness, a shadow of vulgarity nowhere 
efse to be discerned in the ways of this most unvulgar of 
mankind. But such shadows were merely on the surface. 
Inwardly, Landor's letters show him ill content, and long- 
ing, if he only knew how to find it, for something high 
and steadfast in his life. He was given as much as ever 
to solid reading and reflection, and stirred in a moment 
to wholesome and manly sorrow at the loss of a friend 
or the breach of an old association. A Mrs. Lambe, whom 
he had warmly regarded from boyhood, died about this 
time at Warwick, and soon afterwards came the news of 
the sudden death in India of Rose Aylraer, the friend of 
Welsh days to whose casual loan Landor, as we saw, had 
been indebted for the first hint of Gebir. By both these 
losses Landor was deeply moved, by that of Rose Aylmer 
in especial his thoughts being for days and nights entire- 
ly possessed. During his vigils he wrote the first draft of 
the little elegy, " carved as it were in ivory or in gems/' 
which in its later form became famous : 

"Ah, what avails the sceptred race? 
Ah, what the form divine ? 
What every virtue, every grace? 
Eose Aylmer, all were thine. 



44 LANDOR. [chap. 

" Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes 
May weep, but never see, 
A night of memories and of sighs 
I consecrate to thee." 

Just, natural, simple, severely and at the same time haunt- 
ingly melodious, however baldly or stoically they may 
strike the ear attuned to more high-pitched lamentations, 
these are the lines which made afterwards so deep an im- 
pression upon Charles Lamb. Tipsy or sober, it is re- 
ported of that impressionable spirit a few years before his 
death, he would always be repeating JRose Aylmer. The 
effect obtained by the iteration of the young girl's two 
beautiful names at the beginning of the fourth and fifth 
lines is an afterthought. In place of this simple, musical 
invocation, the fourth line had originally begun with a 
lame explanatory conjunction, "For, Aylmer," and the 
fifth with a commonplace adjective, *' Sweet Aylmer." In 
the seventh line " memories " is a correction for the allit- 
erative and vaguer " sorrows " of the first draft. Landor's 
affection for the same lost friend and companion is again 
expressed, we may remember, in another poem of a much 
later date headed Ahertawy, which furnishes a good exam- 
ple of his ordinary manner, part playful, part serious, and 
not free from slips both of taste and workmanship, in this 
kind of autobiographical reminiscence, and which ends 
with the following gravely tender lines : 

" Where is she now ? Call'd far away 
By one she dared not disobey, 
To those proud halls, for youth unfit, 
Where princes stand and judges sit. 
Where Ganges rolls his widest wave 
She dropt her blossom in the grave ; 
Her noble name she never changed, 
Nor was her nobler heart estranged." 



III.] BATH. 45 

The losses above mentioned and others occurring in the 
circle of Landor's friends about this time, 1805 — 1806, 
prompted him to compose several pieces of the elegiac 
kind, both in English and Latin, v^hich he collected and 
published under the title Simonidea. But these elegiac 
pieces did not stand alone. They were accompanied by 
others in right of which the volume might just as well 
have been called Anacreontica, namely, a selection, made by 
lanthe, of love-poems addressed in English to herself, be- 
sides some Latin verses of so free a tenour that Landor 
was by-and-by ashamed of having published them. " I 
printed whatever was marked with a pencil by a woman 
who loved me, and I consulted all her caprices. I added 
some Latin poetry of my own, more pure in its Latinity 
than its sentiment. When you read the Simonidea^ pity 
and forgive me." Several of Landor's early writings are 
now excessively rare, more than one, indeed, being only 
known to exist in a solitary example; but of the Simoni- 
dea, so far as I have been able to ascertain, not even a sin- 
gle copy has been preserved. 

Soon after this, moved, it would seem, partly by his 
strained finances and partly by his sanguine imagination, 
Landor conceived the plan of alienating his paternal estate 
in Staffordshire, in order to acquire another yielding, or 
capable of being made to yield, larger returns in a wilder 
part of the country. He turned his thoughts first towards 
the lakes. Here he made a tour in the spring of 1807, 
found an estate which enchanted him, beside the small 
romantic Lake of Loweswater, and at once began negotia- 
tions for its purchase. These falling through, he in the 
next year pitched upon another and a very noble property, 
which was for sale in a country nearer to his own accus- 
tomed haunts, that, namely, of Llanthony, on the Welsh 



46 LANDOR. ^ [chap. 

border. To his overwhelming desire to become lord of 
Llanthony all impediments had now to give way, with 
what consequences to himself and others we sh-all see. 

But before the complicated arrangements connected with 
this purchase were completed, events of great interest in 
Landor's life had come to pass. First, there was the begin- 
ning of his acquaintance with Southey. Of all English 
writers of that ao-e, thev were the two who most resembled 
each other by their science in the technical craft of letters, 
by their high and classical feeling for the honour and dig- 
nity of the English language, and by the comprehensive- 
ness and solidity of their reading. Ever since Southey 
had discovered that Landor was the author of Gehh% and 
Landor that Southey was its admiring critic, a precon- 
ceived sympathy had sprung up between the two men. 
Since then Southey had written Madoc, the first, and Tha~ 
laba^ the second of his mythological epics, and in Madoc 
had avowedly profited by Landor's example, both as to the 
way of seeing^ as he put it, for the purposes of poetry, and 
as to the management of his blank verse. On his tour in 
the lake country, Landor, who was no seeker of acquaint- 
ances, and indeed once boasted, in his serene w^ay, that he 
had never accepted a letter of introduction in his life, had 
missed, and expressed his regret at missing, the opportu- 
nity of meeting Southey. 

It was in Southey's native Bristol, at the lodgings of his 
friend Danvers, that he and Landor met for the first time 
in the spring of 1808. They took to each other at once, 
and a friendship was formed which lasted without break 
or abatement for thirty years. In many of their opinions 
Landor and Southey differed much ah'eady, and their dif- 
ferences were destined to increase as time w^ent on, but 
differences of opinion brought no shadow between them. 



III.] SOUTHEY. 4*7 

Each seems instinctively to have recognized whatever was 
sterling, loyal, and magnanimous in the other's nature. 
Each, though this is a minor matter, heartily respected in 
the other the scrupulous and accomplished literary work- 
man. Each probably liked and had a fellow-feeling for 
the other's boyish exuberance of vitality and proneness to 
exaggeration and denunciation. For it is to be noted that 
Landor's intimacies were almost always with men of em- 
phatic and declamatory eloquence like his own. Parr, the 
most honoured friend of his youth, Southey and Francis 
Hare, the most cherished of his manhood, were all three 
Olympian talkers in their degree. But Landor and his 
kindred Olympians, it seems, understood each otiier, and 
knew how to thunder and lio-hten without collision. These 
last, as it happens, are the very words afterwards used by 
Southey in preparing a common friend for the kind of per- 
sonage he would meet in Landor. " He does more than 
any of the gods of all my mythologies, for his very words 
are thunder and lightning, such is the power and splendour 
with which they burst out. But all is perfectly natural ; 
there is no trick about him, no preaching, no playing off." 
If we thus have Southey's testimony at once to the im- 
pressiveness and to the integrity of Landor's personality, 
we have Landor's to "the genial voice and radiant eye" of 
Southey, besides a hundred other expressions of affection 
for his person and admiration for his character and his 
powers. 

With the immediate result of his own and Landor's first 
conversation Southey could not fail to be gratified. He had 
been forced of late to abandon his most cherished task, 
the continuance of his series of mythologic epics. The 
plain reason was that he could not afford to spend time on 
work so little remunerative. Landor, when Southey told 



48 LANDOR. [chap. 

him this, was in an instant all generosity and delicacy, beg- 
ging to be allowed to print future productions of the kind 
at his o-wn expense — " as many as you will write, and as 
many copies as you please." In all this there was not the 
least taint of patronage or condescension on the part of 
the magnificent young squire and scholar towards the 
struggling, although already distinguished, man of letters, 
his senior by only a year. Landor was as incapable of as- 
suming superiority on any grounds but those of character 
and intellect as of enduring such assumption in others. 
Southey, as it turned out, only made practical use of his 
friend's offer to the extent of allowing him to buy a con- 
siderable number of copies of Kehama when that work ap- 
peared. But the encouragement was everything to him, 
and had for its consequence that Kehama, already begun 
and dropped, was industriously resumed and finished, and 
followed in due course by Roderick, the manuscript of 
either poem being dutifully sent off in successive instal- 
ments as it was written for Landor to read and criticise. 
At the same time an active and intimate correspondence 
sprung up between the two men, and in after-years sup- 
plied, indeed, the chief aliment of their friendship, their 
meetings being, from the force of circumstances, rare. 

The next event in Landor's life was his sudden and brief 
appearance as a man of action on the theatre of European 
war. Napoleon Buonaparte had just carried into effect the 
infamous plot which he had conceived in order to make 
himself master of Spain and Portugal. But before his 
brother Joseph had time to be proclaimed king at Madrid, 
all Spain was up in arms. Against the French armies of 
occupation there sprang up from one end of the country 
to the other first a tumultuary and then an organized re- 
sistance. So swift, efficient, and unanimous a rising had 



III.] SPAIN. 49 

nowhere else been witnessed. A people, it seemed, had at 
last been found with manhood enough in their veins to 
refuse the yoke of France, and in the hearts of all friends 
of liberty despair began to give way to hope. How much 
of anarchical self-seeking and distracted, pusillanimous 
intrigue in reality lay latent in these patriot bosoms was 
little suspected in the enthusiasm of the hour. In Eng- 
land especially, the Spaniards were passionately acclaimed 
as a race of heroes, on whose victory depended the very 
salvation of the world. Instant help, both in men and 
money, was despatched to the insurgents by the English 
Government. Poets and orators extolled their deeds ; vol- 
unteers pressed to join their standards. While Words- 
worth, Southey, and Coleridge, from the seclusion of their 
lakes and mountains, did their utmost to swell the tide 
of popular emotion, Landor on his part was not content 
with words. One evening at Brighton he found himself 
"preaching a crusade" to an audience of two Irish gentle- 
men, who caught his ardour, and the three determined to 
start for Spain without more ado. Early in August they 
set sail from Falmouth for Corunna, which was the seat of 
an English mission under Stuart, afterwards ambassador 
in Paris. From Corunna Landor addressed a letter to the 
provincial government, enclosing a gift of ten thousand 
reals for the relief of the inhabitants of Venturada, a town 
burnt by the French, and at the same time proclaiming 
that he would equip at his own cost, and accompany to 
the field, all volunteers up to the number of a thousand 
who might choose to join him. Both gift and proclama- 
tion were thankfully acknowledged; a body of volunteers 
was promptly organized ; and Landor marched with them 
through Leon and Gallicia to join the Spanish army under 
Blake in the mountains of Biscay. In the meantime his 
3* 



50 LANDOR. [chap. 

incurably jealous and inflammable spirit of pride, inflam- 
mable especially in contact with those in oflice or authori- 
ty, had caught fire at a depreciatory phrase dropped by 
the English envoy, Stuart, at one of the meetings of the 
Junta. Stuart's expression had not really referred to Lan- 
dor at all, but he chose to apply it to himself, and on his 
march accordingly indited and made public an indignant 
letter of remonstrance. 

To the groundless disgust which Landor had thus con- 
ceived and vented at a fancied sligjit, was soon added that 
with which he was more reasonably inspired by the in- 
competence and sloth of the Spanish general, Blake. He 
remained with the army of the North for several idle 
weeks in the neighbourhood of Reynosa and Aguilar. He 
was very desirous of seeing Madrid, but denied himself the 
excursion for fear of missing a battle, which after all was 
never fought. It was not until after the end of Septem- 
ber, when the convention between Sir Hew Dalrymple 
and Junot had been signed in Portugal, and when Blake's 
army broke up its quarters at Reynosa, that Landor, his 
band of volunteers having apparently melted away in the 
meanwhile, separated himself from the Spanish forces and 
returned suddenly to England. He narrowly escaped be- 
ing taken prisoner in the endeavour to travel by way of 
Bilbao, which had then just been re-entered by the French 
under Ney. The thanks of the supreme Junta for his 
services were in course of time conveyed to him at home, 
together with the title and commission of an honorary 
colonel in the Spanish army. 

Landor had departed leaving his countrymen in a frenzy 
of enthusiasm. He found them on his return in a frenzy 
of indignation and disgust. The military compromise just 
effected in Portugal was denounced by popular clamour in 



III.] SPAIN. 51 

terms of immeasiired fury, and not by popular clamour 
only. Men of letters and of thought are habitually too 
much given to declaiming at their ease against the delin- 
quencies of men of action and affairs. The inevitable fric- 
tion of practical politics generates heat enough already, 
and the office of the political thinker and critic should 
be to supply not heat but light. The difficulties which 
attend his own unmolested task, the task of seeking after 
and proclaiming salutary truths, should teach him to make 
allowance for the far more urgent difficulties which beset 
the politician, the man obliged, amid the clash of interests 
and temptations, to practise from hand to mouth, and at 
his peril, the most uncertain and at the same time the 
most indispensable of the experimental arts. The early 
years of this century in England may not have been years 
remarkable for wise or consistent statesmanship ; they 
were certainly remarkable for the frantic vituperation of 
those in power by those who looked on. The writers of 
the Lake school were at this time as loud and as little 
reasonable in their outcries as any group of men in the 
kingdom, and Southey was the loudest of them all. His 
letters, and especially his letters to Landor, on the public 
questions of the hour, can hardly be read even now with- 
out a twinge of humiliation at the spectacle of a man of 
his knowledge, sincerity, and candour giving way to so 
idle a fury of misjudgment and malediction. Landor, on 
his part, is moderate by comparison, and has a better hold 
both of facts and principles, although he is ready to go 
great lengths with his friend in condemnation of the Eng- 
lish ministers and commanders. 

Li the succeeding winter and spring nothing but Spain 
was in men's minds or conversation. After the victory 
aiid death of Sir John Moore at Corunna in January, 1809, 



52 ' LANDOR. [chap. 

Landor was for a while on the point of sailing for that 
country as a volunteer for the second time. Eventually, 
however, he forbore, private affairs in connexion with his 
new property at f^lanthony helping among other things to A| 
detain him. In order to effect this purchase Landor had 
required as much as 20,000/. over and above the sum real- 
ized by the sale of his Staffordshire estate. For this pur- 
pose he made up his mind to sell Tacb brook, the smaller 
of the two properties in Warwickshire destined to devolve 
to him at the death of his mother. Her consent was nec- 
essary to this step, as well as that of his brothers, and an 
act of parliament authorizing the breach of the entail. 
All these matters, together with some minor arrangements 
protecting the interests of Mrs. Landor and her other chil- 
dren by charges on the new estate, and the like, were got 
through in the summer of this year (1809).* Early in the 
autumn of the same year we find Landor established in 
temporary quarters on his new property. It was a wild 
and striking country that he had chosen for his future 
home. Most readers are probably familiar with the dis- 
tant aspect of those mountains, whose sombre masses and 
sweeping outlines arrest the eye of the spectator looking 
westward over the Welsh marches from the summit of the 
Malvern hills. These are the Black or Hatterill moun- 
tains of Monmouthshire and Brecknockshire. Of all their 
recesses the most secluded and most romantic, although 
not the most remote, is the valley of Ewias, within which 
stands the ruined priory of Llanthony.^ This valley winds 

* Pronounce Llanthony ; said to be short for Llandevi Nanthodeni, 
?'.e., church of St. David by the water of Hodeni. The early history 
of this famous border priory is better known than that of almost 
any other foundation of the same kind ; see the articles of Mr. Rob- 
erts in Archceologia Cambrensis^ vol. i., No. 3, and of Mr. Freeman, 



in.] • LLANTHONY. 53 

for some twelve miles between two high continuous ridges, 
of which the sides are now flowing and now precipitous, 
here broken into wooded dingles, here receding into grassy 
amphitheatres, and there heaped with the copse -grown 
ruins of ancient landslips. Along its bed there races or 
loiters according to the weather — and it is a climate noto- 
rious for rain — the stream Hodeni, Honddu, or Hondy. 
The opening of the valley is towards the south, and was 
blocked in ancient times with thickets and morasses, so 
that its only approach was over one or other of its lofty 
lateral ridges. In those days the scene was wont to lay 
upon the few who ever entered it the spell of solitude and 
penitential awe. It was said that St. David had for ?. time 
dwelt here as a hermit. In the reiscn of William Rufus a 
certain knight having found his way into the valley during 
the chase, the call fell upon him to do the like ; the fame 
of his conversion reached the court ; he was joined by a 
second seeker after the holy life, then by others; gifts and 
wealth poured in upon them ; they were enrolled as a broth- 
erhood of the order of St. Augustine, and built themselves 
a priory in the midst of the valley, on a level field half a 
furlong above the stream. Its ruins are still standing dark 
and venerable amid the verdure of the valley, a rambling 
assemblage of truncated towers, disroofed presbytery, shat- 
tered aisles, and modernized outbuildings. The remains of 
the prior's lodgings, together with that one of the two 
western towers to which they are contiguous, are fitted up, 
the ancient sanctities all forgotten, as a bailiff's house and 
inn. The avocations of dairy, scullery, and larder are car- 
ried on beneath the shelter of the other tower, while the 

ibid., 3rd series, vol. i. ; also a sketch by the present writer in the 
Portfolio, January, 1881, from which last two or three sentences are 
repeated in the text. 



54 LAN DOR. [cH^r. 

wild rose and snapdragon wave from the crevices over- 
head, and the pigeons flit and nestle among the shaftless 
openings. 

Such as Llanthony Priory is now, such, making allow- 
ance for some partial dilapidations which neither he nor 
his successors took enough care to prevent, it in all essen- 
tials was when Landor took it over from its former owner 
in the spring of 1809, and along with it the fine estate to 
which it owes its name. The property is some eight miles 
long, and includes for that distance the whole sweep of the 
vale of Ewias. The valley farms contain rich pasturage 
and fairly productive corn-lands, while the eastern ridge is 
covered with grass, and the western with richly heathered 
moor. The moors yield tolerable shooting, and the Hondy 
is famous for its trout. But it was not for the sake of 
shooting or fishing that Landor came to Llanthony. He 
was, indeed, devoted to animals, but not in the ordinary 
English sense of being devoted to the pastime of killing 
them. One of the points by which observers used after- 
wards to be most struck in Landor was the infinite affec- 
tion and mutual confidence which subsisted between him 
and his pets of the dumb creation, both dogs and others, 
with whom the serenity of iiis relations used to remain 
perfectly undisturbed throughout his most explosive dem- 
onstrations against the delinquencies of his own species. 
But his sympathies for animals were not confined to pets. 
In early days he had plied both gun and rod, but by this 
time or soon afterwards he seems to have quite given them 
up. Even in youth he had suffered acute remorse on one 
day finding a partridge, which he had bagged over night 
and supposed dead, still alive in the morning. Cruelty was 
for him the chief — " if not indeed," as he once put it, " the 
only" — sin, and cruelty to animals was at least as bad as 



III.] LLANTHONY. 55 

cruelty to men. Anglings in later life, he once wrote of as 
" that sin." In a letter to his sister he writes more tol- 
erantly, and with a touch of his peculiar charm, of field 
sports in general : " Let men do these things if they will. 
Perhaps there is no harm in it; perhaps it makes them no 
crueller than they would be otherwise. But it is hard to 
take away what we cannot give, and life is a pleasant thing 
— -at least to birds. No doubt the young ones say tender 
things to one another, and even the old ones do not dream 
of death." 

If Landor was thus little of a sportsman, there was 
another province of a country gentleman's pursuits into 
which he could enter with all his heart, and that was plant- 
ing. He loved trees as he loved flowers, not with any 
scientific or practical knowledge, but with a poet's keen- 
ness ot perception, heightened by a peculiar vein of reflect- 
ive and imaginative association. He could, not bear either 
the unnecessary plucking of the one or felling of the other. 
" Ah," he represents himself in one of his dialogues as ex- 
claiming i.t the sight of two fallen pines in Lombardy — 

"... Ah, Don Pepino! old trees in their living state are the only 
things that money cannot command. Rivers leave their beds, run 
into cities, and traverse mountains for it ; obelisks and arches, palaces 
and temples, amphitheatres and pyramids, rise up like exhalations at 
its bidding; even the free spirit of Man, the only thing great on 
earth, crouches and cowers in its presence. It passes away and van- 
ishes before venerable trees. What a sweet odour is here ! whence 
comes it? sweeter it appears to me and stronger than the pine it- 
self." 

The interlocutor, Don Pepino, explains that the odoui 
proceeds from a neighbouring linden, and that the lin- 
den, «i very old and large one, is doomed ; whereupon Lan- 
dor - 



56 LANDOR. [chap. 

" Don Pepino ! the French, who abhor whatever is old and what- 
ever is great, have spared it ; the Austrians, who sell their fortresses 
and their armies, nay, sometimes their daughters, have not sold it : 
must it fall ? . . . 

" How many fond and how many lively thoughts have been nurt- 
ured under this tree ! how many kind hearts have beaten here ! Its 
branches are not so numerous as the couples they have invited to sit 
beside it, nor its blossoms and leaves as the expressions of tender- 
ness it has witnessed. What appeals to the pure all-seeing heavens ! 
what similitudes to the everlasting mountains ! what protestations of 
eternal truth and constancy from those who now are earth ; they, and 
their shrouds, and their coffins !" 

The passage in which Landor has best expressed his 
feeling about flowers is one of verse, and one of the few 
in his writings which are well known, though not so well 
as by its unmatched delicacy and grave, unobtrusive sweet- 
ness it deserves : 

" When hath wind or ram • 

Borne hard upon weak plants that wanted me, 

And I (however they might bluster round) 

Walkt ofiE ? 'Twere most ungrateful : for sweet scents 

Are the swift vehicles of still sweeter thoughts, 

And nurse and pillow the dull memory 

That would let drop without them her best stores. 

They bring me tales of youth and tones of love, 

And* 'tis and ever was my wish and way 

To let all flowers live freely, and all die 

(Whene'er their Genius bids their souls depart) 

Among their kindred in their native place. 

I never pluck the rose; the violet's head 

Hath shaken with ray breath upon its bank 

And not reproacht it ; the ever-sacred cup 

Of the pure lily hath between my hands 

Felt safe, unsoil'd, nor lost one grain of gold." 

" I love these beautiful and peaceful tribes," Lanaoi sayg 
elsewhere, with special reference to the flowers of LiaD- 



III.] LLANTHONY. 57 

thony ; " they always meet one in the same place at the 
same season ; and years have no more effect on their placid 
countenances than on so many of the most favoured gods." 
Such are the exquisite tendernesses of feeling and imagi- 
nation which go together in Landor with his masterful en- 
ergy and strength. 

With these tastes and predilections, then, and in his 
lordly, imaginative, sanguinely unpractical manner, Landor 
entered upon his new career as the beneficent landowner of 
a neglected and backward neighbourhood. He would have 
the priory restored, and for that purpose portions of the 
existing ruins were taken down, and their stones carefully 
numbered. He would raise a new mansion for himself 
and his heirs, and he set the builders to work accordingly 
upon a site a quarter of a mile above the ruins. Com- 
munications in the district were by rough bridle-paths and 
fords, and Landor set gangs of men about the construction 
of roads and bridges. Agriculture was miserably primi- 
tive ; he imported sheep from Segovia, and applied to 
Southey and other friends for tenants who should intro- 
duce and teach improved methods of cultivation. The 
inhabitants were drunken, impoverished, and morose ; he 
was bent upon reclaiming and civilizing them. The woods 
had suffered from neglect or malice ; he would clothe the 
sides of the valley with cedars of Lebanon. With that 
object he bought two thousand cones, calculated to yield 
a hundred seeds each, intending to do ten times as much 
afterwards, and exulting in the thought of the two million 
cedar-trees which he would thus leave for the shelter and 
the delight of posterity. 

While all these great operations were in progress, 

Landor was not a permanent resident, but only a frequent 

visitor, on his estate, inhabiting for a few weeks at a time 
E 



58 LANDOR. [chap. 

the rooms in the church tower, and living in the intervals 
principally at Bath. Here, in the early spring of 1811, 
he met a young lady at a ball, and as soon as he had set 
eyes on her exclaimed, in the true Landorian manner, " By 
heaven ! that's the nicest girl in the room, and I'll marry 
her." And marry her he did ; the adventure quickly end- 
ing in that irreversible manner, instead of, as others as 
rashly begun had ended, in protestations, misumlerstand- 
ings, and retreat. Mr. Forster appositely contrasts Lan- 
dor's reckless action with his weighty and magnificent 
words concerning marriage : " Death itself to the reflect- 
ing mind is less serious than marriage. The elder plant 
is cut down that the younger may have room to flourish : 
a few tears drop into the loosened soil, and buds and blos- 
soms spring over it. Death is not even a blow, is not even 
a pulsation ; it is a pause. But marriage unrolls the awful 
lot of numberless generations. Health, Genius, Honour, 
are the words inscribed on some ; on others are Disease, 
Fatuity, and Infamy." But it was Landor's fate to be 
thus wise only for others; wise on paper; wise after the 
event ; wise, in a word, in every and any manner except 
such as could conduce to his own welfare. His marriage 
was not a happy one. His bride, Julia Thuillier, was the 
portionless daughter of an unprosperous banker at Ban- 
bury, said to be descended from an old Swiss family. 
Landor, with his moods of lofty absence and pre-occupa- 
tion, and with the tumultuous and disconcerting nature, 
sometimes, of his descents into the region of reality, must 
at best have been a trying companion to live with. Never- 
theless it would seem as though a woman capable of shar-- 
ing his thoughts, and of managing him in his fits of pas- 
sion, as his wiser friends were accustomed to manage him 
in later years, by yielding to the storm at first, until his 



Ill] MAKRIAGE. 69 

own sense of humour would be aroused and it would dis- 
perse itself in peals of laughter, might have had an envia- 
ble, if not an easy, life with one so great-minded and so 
fundamentally kind and courteous. Mrs. Landor seems to 
have had none of the gifts of the domestic artist ; she was 
not one of those fine spirits who study to create, out of 
the circumstances and characters with which they have to 
deal, the best attainable ideal of a home ; but a common- 
place provincial beauty enough, although lively and agree- 
able in her way. "God forbid," in conversation once 
growled Landor, who was habitually reticent on his private 
troubles, " that I should do otherwise than declare that 
she always was agreeable — to every one but me." She 
was sixteen years or more younger than her husband; 
a fact of which, when differences occurred, she seems to 
have been not slow to remind him ; and there is impartial 
evidence to show that, in some at least of the disputes 
which led to breaches more or less permanent between 
them, the immediately offending tongue was not the hus- 
band's but the wife's. He himself once breaks out, in 
commenting on Milton's line, 

"Because thou hast hearken'd to the voice of thy wife," 

"there are very few who have not done this, h<xn gre, mat 
gre ; and many have thought it curse enough of itself." 
These matters, however, belong to a later point of our nar- 
rative. At first the little wife, with her golden hair, her 
smiles, and her spirits, seems to have done very well. She 
accompanied Landor on his visits to Llanthony, where 
they received as guests, at^^ first in the tower rooms of the 
priory, and later in some that had been got habitable in 
the new house, several members of his family and friends. 
The South eys, to Landor's great delight, were his first 



«0 LANDOR. [chap. 

visitors, coming in tlie summer of 1811, within a few 
months of his marriage. Later came his sisters, and later 
again, his mother. 

But neither the care of his estate nor his marriage had 
the least interrupted the habitual occupations of Landor's 
mind. What he really most valued in a beautiful country 
was the fit and inspiring theatre which it afforded for his 
meditations. Whether in town or country he reflected 
and composed habitually out walking, and therefore pre- 
ferred at all times to walk alone. " There were half-hours," 
he represents himself as saying to Southey, " when, although 
in good humour and good spirits, we would on no con- 
sideration be disturbed by the necessity of talking. In 
this interval there is neither storm nor sunshine of the 
mind, but calm and (as the farmers call it) growing 
weather, in which the blades of thought spring up and 
dilate insensibly. Whatever I do I must do in the open 
air, or in the silence of night ; either is sufficient ; but I 
prefer the hours of exercise, or, what is next to exercise, 
of field-repose." In these years Landor was composing 
much. In 1810 he printed a couple of Latin odes, Ad 
Gustavum Regem, Ad Gustavum exsulem, and began the 
first of his Idyllia Heroica in that language, on the touch- 
ing story of the priest Coresus, his love and sacrifice. He 
also grappled for the first time with English tragedy. His 
choice of subject was dictated by his own and the general 
interest in and enthusiasm for Spain. He fixed on that 
romantic and semi-mythical episode of early Spanish his- 
tory, the alliance of the heroic Count Julian with the in- 
vading Moors, of whom he had, been formerly the scourge, 
against his own people and their king, Roderick, in order 
to avenge the outrage which Roderick had done to his 
daughter. The same subject was in various forms occu- 



in.] COUNT JULIAN. 61 

pying both Southey and Scott about tbe same time; 
Southey in his epic of Roderick, called in the first draft 
Pelayo, and sent in instalments as it was written to Lan- 
dor ; and Scott in his Vision of Don Rodericlc. Landor 
had begun his tragedy, as it happened, at the same time 
as Southey his epic, in the late summer of 1810, and he 
finished it early the next spring. His tragedy and his en- 
gagement are amusingly mixed up in a letter written to 
Southey in April, and ending "Adieu, and congratulate 
me. I forgot to say that I have added thirty-five verses 
to Scene 2 of Act III." 

Landor's theory was that the passions should in poetry, 
and especially in tragedy, be represented " naked, like the 
heroes and the Gods." In realizing the high and des- 
perate passions of Roderick and Julian, the offender and 
the avenger, he has girded himself for rivalry with what- 
ever is austere, haughty, pregnant, and concise in the works 
of the masters whom he most admired for those qualities. 
But in raising his characters up to this ideal height, in 
seeking to delineate their passions in forms of this heroic 
energy and condensation, this "nakedness," to use his own 
word, Landor has not, I think, succeeded in keeping them 
human. Human to himself, during the process of their 
creation, they unquestionably vyere ; " I brought before 
me," he writes, " the various characters, the very tones of 
their voices, their forms, complexions, and step. In the 
daytime I laboured, and at night unburdened my mind, 
shedding many tears*" Nevertheless they do not live in 
like manner for the reader. The conception of Count 
Julian, desperately loving both his dishonoured daughter 
and the country against which he has turned in order to 
chastise her dishonourer ; inexorably bent on a vengeance 
the infliction of which costs him all the while the direst 



62 LANDOR. [chap. 

agony aijd remorse ; is certainly grandiose and terrible 
enough. But even this conception does not seem to be 
realized, except at moments, in a manner to justify the 
enthusiastic praise bestowed upon it by De Quincey, in 
his erratic, fragmentary, and otherwise grudging notes on 
Landor. Still less are we livingly impressed by the van- 
quished, remorseful, still defiant and intriguing Roderick, 
the injured and distracted Egilona, the dutiful and out- 
raged Gov ilia, her lover Sisabert, or the vindictive and sus- 
picious Moorish leader Muza. These and the other char- 
acters are made to declare themselves by means of utter- 
ances often admirably energetic, and of images sometimes 
magnificently daring ; yet they fail to convince or carry us 
away. This effect is partly due, no doubt, to defect of 
dramatic construction. The scenes of the play succeed 
each other by no process of organic sequence or evolution 
— a fact admitted by Landor himself when he afterwards 
called it a series of dialogues rather than a drama. Some 
of them are themselves dramatically sterile, tedious, and 
confusing. Others, and isolated lines and sayings in al- 
most all, are written, if not with convincing felicity, at any 
rate with overmastering force. On the whole, we shall be 
more inclined to agree with Lamb's impression of Count 
Julian than with De Quincey's. " I must read again Lan- 
dor's Julian,'''' writes Lamb, in 1815. "I have not read 
it for some time. I think he must have failed in Roder- 
ick, for I remember nothing of him, nor of any distinct 
character as a character — only fine sounding passages." 
The reader may perhaps judge of the quality of the 
work by the following fragment, exhibiting at its high- 
est point of tension the struggle between the enemies 
Roderick and Julian after Roderick has fallen into Julian'is 
power : 



i' 



III.] COUNT JULIAN. 63 

" Julian. Could I speak patiently who speak to theej 
I would say more . . . part of thy punishment 
It should be, to be taught. 

Roderigo. Keserve thy wisdom 

Until thy patience come, its best ally. 
I learn no lore, of peace or war, from thee. 

Julian. No, thou shalt study soon another tongue, 
And suns more ardent shall mature thy mind. 
Either the cross thou bearest, and thy knees 
Among the silent caves of Palestine 
Wear the sharp flints away with midnight prayer; 
Or thou shalt keep the fasts of Barbary, 
Shalt wait amid the crowds that throng the well 
From sultry noon till the skies fade again, 
To draw up water and to bring it home 
In the crackt gourd of some vile testy knave, 
Who spurns thee back with bastinadoed foot 
For ignorance or delay of his command, 

Roderigo. Rather the poison or the bowstring. 

Julian. Slaves 

To others' passions die such deaths as those : 
Slaves to their own should die — 

Roderigo. What worse ? 

Julian. Their owa. 

Roderigo. Is this thy counsel, renegade? 

Julian. Not mine; 

I point a better path, nay, force thee on. 
I shelter thee from every brave man's sword 
While I am near thee : I bestow on thee 
Life : if thou die, 'tis when thou sojournest 
Protected by this arm and voice no more ; 
'Tis slavishly, 'tis ignominiously, 
'Tis by a villain's knife. 

Roderigo. By whose ? 

Julian. Roderigo's." 

Landor's seyere method does not admit much scenic or 
accessory ornament in a work of this kind, but he has 



64 LANDOR. [chap. 

made a vivid and pleasant use of his own recent Spanish 
experiences in the passage where Julian speaks to his 
daughter of the retreats where she may hide her shame: 

" Wide are the regions of our far-famed land ; 
Thou shalt arrive at her remotest bounds, 
See her best people, choose some holiest house ; 
Whether where Castro from surrounding vines 
Hears the hoarse ocean roar among his caves, 
And through the fissure in the green churchyard 
The wind wail loud the calmest summer day ; 
Or where Santona leans against the hill, 
Hidden from sea and land by groves and bowers." 

And again — 

" If strength be wanted for security, 
Mountains the guard, forbidding all approach 
With iron-pointed and uplifted gates. 
Thou wilt be welcome too in Aguilar, 
Impenetrable, marble-turreted. 
Surveying from aloft the limpid ford, 
The massive fane, the sylvan avenue ; 
Whose hospitality I proved myself, 
A willing leader in no impious war 
When fame and freedom urged me ; or mayst dwell 
In Reynosas' dry and thriftless dale, 
Unharvested beneath October moons, 
Among those frank and cordial villagers." 

For the rest, Count Julian is not poor in solid and pro- 
found reflexions upon life, carved, polished, and compress- 
ed in the manner which was Landor's alone, as thus ; 

*' Wretched is he a woman hath forgiven ; 
With her forgiveness ne'er hath love return'd ;" 

or thus — 

" Of all who pass us in life's drear descent ' 
We ffrieve the most for those who ^oisht to die." 



HI.] COUNT JULIAN. 65 

During the composition of Count Julian Landor had 
been in close correspondence with Southey, and had sub- 
mitted to him the manuscript as it progressed. He had 
at one moment entertained the obviously impracticable 
idea of getting his tragedy put on the stage by Kemble. 
This abandoned, he offered it to Longmans for publication. 
They declined to print it either at their own costs, or even, 
when he proposed that method, at the author's. Where- 
upon Landor writes to Southey: "We have lately had 
cold weather here, and fires. On receiving the last letter 
of Mr. Longman I committed to the flames my tragedy of 
Ferranti and Giulio, with which I intended to surprise 
you, and am resolved that never verse of mine shall be 
hereafter committed to anything else. My literary career 
has been a very curious one. You cannot imagine how I 
feel relieved at laying down its burden, and abandoning 
its tissue of humiliations. I fancied I had at last ac- 
quired the right tone of tragedy, and was treading down 
at heel the shoes of Alfieri." The resolution recorded 
with this composed and irrevocable air lasted no longer 
than the choler which had provoked it ; and though the 
play of Ferranti and Giulio, all but a few fragments, had 
been irretrievably sacrificed, we find Count Julian within 
a few months offered to and accepted by Mr. Murray, on 
the introduction of Southey, and actually published at the 
beginning of 1812. 

The same house brought out in the same year another 
production of Lan dor's of a totally different character, 
namely, a Commentary/ on Memoirs of Mr. Fox. In the 
biography of Landor this volume is of peculiar interest. 
It contains his views on men, books, and governments, 
set forth in the manner that was most natural to him, that 
is miscellaneously and without sequence, jn a prose which 
4 



66 LANDOR. [chap. 

has none of the inequalities nor opacities of his verse, 
but is at once condensed and lucid, weighty without em- 
phasis, and stately without effort or inflation. The ful- 
ness of Landor's mind, the clearness and confidence of his 
decisions, the mixed dogmatism and urbanity of his man- 
ner, are nowhere more characteristically displayed. The 
text for his deliverances is furnished by Trotter's Memoirs 
of Fox, then lately published. His motives in writing are 
declared in the following words : " I would represent his 
(Fox's) actions to his contemporaries as I believe they 
will appear to posterity. I would destroy the impression 
of the book before me, because I am firmly persuaded 
that its tendency would be pernicious. The author is an 
amiable man, so was the subject of his memoir. But of 
all the statesmen who have been conversant in the man- 
agement of our affairs, during a reign the most disastrous 
in our annals, the example of Mr. Fox, if followed up, 
would be the most fatal to our interests and glory." Else- 
where he speaks of the sacrifices made during the prepara- 
tion of the book to appease the scruples of its publisher. 
We know from his letters that one of his schemes in those 
days was to render himself and other lovers of free speech 
independent of the publishers, by establishing a printing- 
press of his own at Llanthony, " at a cost of 5000/.," and 
" for the purpose, at much private loss, disquiet, and danger, 
of setting the public mind more erect, and throwing the 
two factions into the dust." The Commentary as actually 
printed contains, first, a dedicatory address to the Presi- 
dent of the United States, deprecating the war then im- 
minent, in consequence of the fiscal policy of Canning, be- 
tween them and the mother country. In the course of 
this dedication we find Landor putting forward for the 
first time one of the fundamental articles of his creed, in 



m.;i COMMENTAliY OK^ MEMomS OF FOX. cV 

the shape of the following classification of animated 
beings : 

" Consider, sir, what are the two nations, if I must call them two, 
which are about, not to terminate, but to extend their animosities by 
acts of violence and slaughter. If you think as I do, and free men, 
allowing for the degree of their capacities, generally think alike, you 
will divide the creatures of the Almighty into three parts : first, men 
who enjoy the highest perfection of liberty and civilization ; second- 
ly, men who live under the despotism of one person or more, and are 
not permitted to enjoy their reason for the promotion of their hap- 
piness ; and thirdly, the brute creation, which is subject also to ar- 
bitrary will, and whose happiness their slender powers of reasoning 
(for some they have) is inadequate to promote. These three classes, 
in my view of the subject, stand at equal distances." 

After the dedication follows a preface full of measured 
invective against those responsible for the political and 
military affairs of England, varied by observations on the 
character of the French and of their ruler, for the character 
of which see above (p. 34), and by the following fine ora- 
torical outburst, a little less accurately wrought and bal- 
anced than it would have been in Landor's later prose, in 
which the stringency of the penal laws against the poor is 
contrasted with the lenient treatment of a State delinquent 
like Lord Melville, long Lord Privy Seal for Scotland and 
President of the Board of Control for India : 

"If an unfortunate mother at a distance from home, carrying with 
her a half -starved infant, along roads covered with snow, should 
snatch a shirt from a hedge to protect it from a miserable death, 
she is condemned to die. That she never could have known the 
law, that she never could have assented to its equity, avails her 
nothing ; that she was pierced by the cries of her own offspring ; 
that itjiwas not merely the instigation of want, but the force of om- 
nipotent nature, the very voice of God himself, the preservation of a 
human being, of her own, the cause of her wanderings and her wretch- 
edness, of her captivity and her chains : what are these in opposition 



68 LANDOR. [chap. 

to an act of parliament ? she dies. Look on the other side. A no- 
bleman of most acute judgment, well versed in all the usages of his 
country, rich, powerful, commanding, with a sway more absolute and 
unresisted than any of its ancient monarchs, the whole kingdom in 
which he was a subject, with all its boroughs, and its shires and its 
courts and its universities, and in addition, as merely a fief, the empire 
of all India ; who possessed more lucrative patronage than all the 
crowned heads in Europe ; let this illustrious character, to whom so 
many men of rank looked up as their protector, and whom senators 
and statesmen acknowledged as their guide ; let this distinguished 
member of the British parliament break suddenly through the law 
which he himself had brought into the House for the conservation 
of our property, without necessity, without urgency, without tempta- 
tion — and behold the consequence." 

The consequence is somewhat flat; and omitting Lan- 
dor's account of Melville's acquittal and careless bearing 
we may remember that the most weighty and pointed of 
all his epigrams in verse is that which he directed against 
the same delinquent : 

" God's laws declare 

Thou shalt not swear 
By aught in heaven above or earth below. 

' Upon my honour !' Melville cries. 

He swears, and lies. 
Does Melville then break God's commandment ? No/' 

Landor's preface further contains reflections on the utility 
and the lessons of history for statesmen, and on their neg- 
lect by Pitt and Fox ; and ends with the expression of a 
wish for the continuance of the present ministry in office, 
and an urgent plea in favour of Catholic emancipation. 
In the body of his book he takes extracts from Trotter's 
Memoirs as they come, and appends to each his own re- 
flexions. Literature and politics, personal topics and gen- 



III.] COMMENTAEY ON MEMOIRS OF FOX. 69 

eral, succeed eacli other promiscuously. Here is what Lan- 
dor has to say of Burke and his policy during the French 
revolution : " Burke, the only member of Parliament whose 
views were extensive, and whose reading was all turned to 
practical account, was more violent than even Lord Gren- 
ville for a declaration of hostilities. His unrivalled elo- 
quence was fatal to our glory ; it silenced our renown for 
justice and for wisdom, undermined our internal prosperi- 
ty, and invaded our domestic peace." Then follows a long 
disparaging criticism of Spenser, whose poetry always 
seemed to Landor fantastic, unreal, and somewhat weari- 
some ; then a comparative note on Chaucer and Burns; 
and then, after discursive criticisms on the creations of 
Caliban and Cyclops, on Addison, and on the Spenserian 
stanza, comes a conclusion of Ciceronian gravity and grace. 
" It is better to leave off where reflexion may rest than 
where passion may be excited ; and it is soothing to take 
the last view of politics from among the works of the 
imagination. . . . An escape in this manner from the mazes 
of politics and the discord of party, leaves such sensations 
on the heart as are experienced by the disinterested and 
sober man, after some public meeting, when he has quit- 
ted the crowded and noisy room, the crooked and narrow 
streets, the hisses and huzzas of the rabble, poor and rich, 
and enters his own grounds again, and meets his own fam- 
ily at the gate." Immediately after which Landor turns 
round again to the charge in a final, denunciatory post- 
script. This remarkable outpouring of an authoritative, 
versatile, and richly stored mind was destined to have no 
influence and few readers. Like the Simonidea, though 
in deference to a different order of susceptibilities, it seems 
to have been recalled almost as soon as it was published, 
and the only copy known to exist is one formerly in the 



VO LANDOR. [chap. 

possession of Southey, and now in that of Lord Hough- 
ton. 

Besides his two tragedies, Count Julian and the lost 
Ferranti and Giulio, Land or wrote during the latter part 
of this Llanthony period a comedy called the Charitable 
Dowager^ the proceeds of which he destined for the relief 
of an old acquaintance in Spain, for whose hospitality he 
had good reason to be grateful when he found himself pre- 
vented from entering Bilbao. The piece was, however, 
neither produced nor even printed, and considering the 
quality of Landor's later efforts in the comic vein, its loss 
is probably not to be regretted. Landor had in these days 
been also at work at what he in his heart cared for most 
of all, his Idyllia and other poems in Latin ; which Valpy, 
he writes, "the greatest of all coxcombs," very much wished 
to publish, but which he preferred to print on his own ac- 
count at Oxford, the proceeds, if any, to be distributed 
among the distressed poor of Leipzig. 

This was towards the close of 1813. In the meantime 
Landor's magnificent projects as a landlord had been crum- 
bling under his hands. Less than four years had brought 
his affairs to such a pass as utterly to disgust him with 
Llanthony, Wales, and the Welsh. There was scarcely one 
of his undertakings but had proved abortive. There was 
scarcely a public authority of his district against whom 
he had not a grievance, or a neighbour, high or low, with 
whom he had not come into collision, or a tenant or la- 
bourer on his estate who had not turned against him. The 
origin of these troubles sprang almost always either from 
Landor's headlong generosity, oi* else from his impractica- 
ble punctiliousness. He had a genius for the injudicious 
virtues, and those which recoil against their possessor. Of 
his besetting faults, pride and anger, pride constantly as- 



III.] LLANTHONY. VI 

sured him that he was not as other men, anger as constant- 
ly resented the behaviour of other men when it fell below 
the standard of his own. He would insist on expecting 
ancient Roman principles in al) with whom he came in con- 
tact, and when he was undecei /ed would flame into Rhada- 
manthine rage against the culprit, idealising peccadilloes 
into enormities, and denouncirg and seeking to have them 
chastised ac€ordingly. Thus he made bad worse, and by 
his lofty, impetuous, unwise ways, turned the whole coun- 
try-side into a hostile camp. It is true that luck and the 
characters of those with whom he had to deal were much 
against him. His first disenchantments arose in the course 
of communications with men in authority. He wrote to 
the bishop of his diocese, asking permission to restore for 
service a part of Llanthony priory. His first letter received 
no answer. He repeated his request in a second, in the 
course of which he remarked, " God alone is great enough 
for me to ask anything of twice ;" to which there came an 
answer coldly sanctioning his proposal, but saying that an 
act of parliament would be required before it could be 
carried out ; whereupon Landor, who had lately had enough 
of acts of parliament, allowed the matter to drop. At the 
Monmouthshire assizes in 1812 he was on the grand jury. 
The members of that body having been in the usual for- 
mal terms adjured by the judge to lay before him whatever 
evidences they possessed of felony committed in the coun- 
ty, what must our noble Roman do but take the adjuration 
literally, and in defiance of all usage deliver with his own 
hand to the judge a written accusation of felony against 
an influential rascal of the neighbourhood, an attorney and 
surveyor of taxes ; coupled with a complaint against his 
brother jurors for neglect of duty in refusing to inquire 
into the case. The judge took no notice of the communi- 



"72 LANDOR. [chap. 

cation, and Lander, having naturally gained nothing by his 
action except the resentful or contemptuous shrugs of his 
fellow-jurors, closed the incident with a second letter of 
polite sarcasm, in which he wrote, " I acknowledge my 
error, and must atone for my presumption. But I really 
thought your lordship was in earnest, seeing you, as I did, 
in the robes of justice, and hearing you speak in the name 
and with the authority of the laws." About the same 
time, partly on the suggestion of the one or two gentle- 
men of the neighbourhood who had culture and character 
enough to be his friends, Landor applied to the Duke of 
Beaufort, the lord lieutenant, to be put on the commission 
of the peace of the county. There was no resident magis- 
trate within ten miles of Llanthony, and yet his applica- 
tion was refused. Partly his politics, partly the fact that 
a brother of the Duke's had been foreman of the grand 
jury at the recent assize, explain the refusal. Landor there- 
upon wrote a temperate letter to the Lord Chancellor (El- 
don), pointing out the necessity of a raagisti-ate being ap- 
pointed for his neighbourhood ; and when he received no 
answer, followed it up by another, haughtier, but not less 
calm and measured, in which he describes his qualifications 
and his pursuits, and contrasts them in a strain of grave 
irony with those usually thought sufficient for a public 
servant : " I never now will accept, my lord, anything what- 
ever that can be given by ministers or by chancellors, not 
even the dignity of a county justice, the only honour or 
office I ever have solicited." 

Landor's worst troubles at Llanthony did not, however, 
proceed from men in high station, but from his own ten- 
ants and labourers. He found the Welsh peasantry churl- 
ish, malicious, and unimprovable. " Tf drunkenness, idle- 
ness, mischief, and revenge are the principal characteristics 



ni.J LLANTHONY. 73 

of the savage state, what nation — I will not say in Europe, 
but in the world — is so singularly tattooed with them as 
the Welsh ?" And again, " The earth contains no race of 
human beings so totally vile and worthless as the Welsh." 
The French themselves seemed no longer odious in com- 
parison. Their government Landor had come to regard 
as at any rate more efficient and better administered than 
ours ; and after three years' experience of the ingratitude, 
thriftlessness, and lawlessness of the people round about 
him, we find him already half determined to go and make 
his home in France. But things would probably never 
have really come to that pass had it not been for the mal- 
practices of an English tenant, to whom Landor had look- 
ed most of all for the improvement of his property. This 
was one Betham, whose family was known, and one of 
his sisters highly esteemed, by both Lamb and Southey. 
Betham had used Southey's name to introduce himself to 
Landor as a tenant, and had been accepted, he and his 
family, with open arms in consequence. Landor rented 
him first one and then another of his best farms on terms 
of reckless liberality, although he knew nothing of agri- 
culture, and his previous career had been that, first, of an 
usher in a school, and then of a petty officer on board an 
East India Company's ship. He is the same whom Lamb 
had in his mind when, years afterwards, he wrote to Lan- 
dor, "I knew all your Welsh annoyancers, the measureless 
B.'s. I knew^ a quarter of a mile of them. Seventeen 
brothers and sixteen sisters, as they appear to me in mem- 
ory. There was one of them that used to fix his long legs 
on my fender and tell a story of a shark every night, end- 
less, immortal. How have I grudged the salt-sea ravener 
not having had his gorge of him." This unconscionable 
tenant not only did nothing for the land, but misconducted 
F 4* 



74 LANDOR. [chap. 

himself scandalously, holding open house for his brothers 
and his sisters, his father and his father's friends, associat- 
ing in the ale-houses with the scum of the neighbourhood, 
neglecting, and by-and-by refusing, to pay his rent, and 
when at last Landor lost patience, leaguing himself with 
other defaulting tenants, and with every malicious attorney 
and every thievish idler in the country-side, to make his 
landlord's existence intolerable. Landor's rents were with- 
held, his game poached, his plantations damaged, his 
timber stolen, his character maligned, and even his life 
threatened. He was like a lion baited by curs. He was 
plunged up to the neck in lawsuits. In the actions and 
counter-actions that were coming up for trial continually 
between himself and his tenants and neighbours, the local 
courts and juries were generally adverse to him, the local 
attorneys insolent. One of these, on some unusual provo- 
cation, Landor beat. " I treated him as he deserved. He 
brought a criminal action against me." In the case of a 
London counsel employed against him, Mr. (afterwards 
Judge) Taunton, Landor adopted a more innocuous, if to 
himself at least as gratifying, mode of revenge. " I would 
not encounter the rudeness I experienced from this Taun- 
ton to save all the property I possess. I have, however, 
chastised him in my Latin verses now in the press." With 
reference to the criminal action pending on the part of the 
other and physically smarting man of law, he writes, *' I 
shall be cited to take my trial at Monmouth ; and as I 
certainly shall not appear, I shall be outlawed." In the 
meantime, his principal suit, for the recovery of nearly 
two thousand pounds due from Betham, had been success- 
ful, and his claim had been allowed by the Court of Ex- 
chequer to the last farthing. But it was too late. Ruin 
stared him in the face. IJe had sunk over seventy thoi;- 



m^ LLANTHONY. lh 

sand pounds upon the LlantLony property in five years, 
and he had no ready money to meet the interest due on 
a mortgage. There were other equally urgent claims. The 
pressure of these, together with the probable results- of his 
resolution not to appear to answer the charge against him 
at Monmouth, determined him, in May, 1814, to retreat 
to the Continent. His personal property, both in Wales 
and at Bath, was sold. The estate of Llanthony was taken 
by arrangement out of his hands, and vested in those of 
trustees. The life-charge in favour of his mother entitled 
her, fortunately, to the position of first creditor. She. had 
an excellent talent for business, as had one at least of her 
younger sons, and Llanthony, under the management of 
its new trustees, soon proved able to yield a handsome 
enough provision for Landor's maintenance after all charges 
upon it had been satisfied. His half-built mansion was 
pulled down, and its remains only exist to-day in the guise 
of a hay -shed ; while in the adjoining dingle the stream 
is all but dried up, and silent,, as if its Naiad had fled with 
her master, while all the rest are vocal. The property still 
belongs to Landor's surviving son. His roads, and a good 
part of his plantations, still exist to bear witness to the 
energy of his years of occupation, and the beautiful Welsh 
valley will be for ever associated with his fame. 

Landor sent to Southey from Weymouth on the 27th 
of May, 1814, a letter dejected and almost desperate, al- 
though written with his unfailing dignity of manner, in 
which he speaks of his future as follows : " I go to-morrow 
to St. Malo. In what part of France I shall end my days 
I know not ; but there I shall end them, and God grant 
that I may end them speedily, and so as to leave as little 
sorrow as possible to my friends. . . . My wife follows 
when I have found a place fit for her reception. Adieu." 



Y6 LANDOR. [chap. hi. 

But the cup of Landor's bitterness was not yet full. He 
sailed, in fact, not to St. Malo, but to Jersey, and was 
there joined by his wife and her young sister. . Mrs. Lan- 
dor disliked the plan of going to live in France, while 
Landor, on his part, was absolutely bent upon it. He 
desired that the question of changing their destination 
might not again be raised. She would not suffer the 
question to drop. Arguing one evening with more than 
usual petulance, she taunted him before her sister with 
their disparity of years. His pride took sudden fire ; he 
rose at four the next morning, crossed the island on foot, 
and before noon was under weigh for the coast of France, 
in an oyster-boat, alone. 



CHAPTER IV. 

LIFE AT TOURS COMO PISA IDYLLIA HEROICA. 

[1814—1821.] 

Up to the date which we have now reached Landor's ca- 
reer seems to present a spectacle of almost as much futil- 
ity as force. His resplendent gifts and lofty purposes 
had been attended with little solid result, either in the 
practical or in the intellectual sphere. In the practical 
part of life he had, indeed, thus far conspicuously failed. 
The existence which he had realized for himself was one 
in which almost all his ideals were reversed. Bent upon 
walking in the paths of serenity, he had nevertheless trod- 
den those of contention. Proudly exacting in his stand- 
ard of intercourse and behaviour, he had been involved in 
ignominious wranglings with the base. Born to wealth, 
and eager to employ it for the public good, he had reap- 
ed nothing but frustration and embarrassment. Tenderly 
chivalrous towards women, he had just turned his back in 
anger upon his young wife. Neither in the other sphere 
of man's activity — the intellectual and imaginative sphere 
— which to him was, in truth, the more real and engrossing 
of the two, had Landor as yet done himself anything like 
full justice. Posterity, if his career had ended here, would 
probably have ignored his writings, or have remembered 
them at most as the fragmentary and imperfect products 



78 LANDOR. [chap. 

of a powerful spirit that had passed away without having 
left any adequate memorial. Several years had still to 
elapse before Landor addressed himself to that which was 
destined to be his great and vital task in literature, the 
writing of the Imaginary Conversations. His life until 
then continued to be unsettled, and his efforts uncertainly 
directed. 

He was not long in recovering from the effect of the 
misfortunes narrated in the last chapter. The relief of 
Latin verses came to the aid of his natural elasticity ; and 
at Tours, whither he made his way from the coast of Brit- 
tany, we find him within a week or two busy upon the 
composition of a mythologic poem in that language — 
Ulysses in' Argiripa — in the course of which the person- 
ages of some of his Welsh tormentors — Betham and his 
sister, and an Abergavenny attorney named G-abell — are 
ingeniously introduced and pilloried.^ Of his quarrel with 
his wife he writes perfectly like a gentleman, doing jastice 
to her contentment and moderation during the trying ex- 
periences of their life at Llanthony, proposing to hand over 
to her all his remaining fortune, reserving only 160/. a 
year for himself; but adding that every kind and tender 
sentiment towards her is rooted up from his heart for ever. 
When, however, he hears after a while that she has suffer- 
ed no less than himself, and been very ill since their dis- 
pute, the news banishes all traces of resentment from his 
mind, and he writes at once " to comfort and console her." 
The result was for the time being a full reconciliation, 
and early in 1815 Mrs. Landor joined her husband at 
Tours. In the intervening months he had been living 
there alone, busying himself with his reading and his Latin 
verses ; buying his own provisions in the market, and mak- 
^ Ulysses in Argiripa^ lib. iii., w. 1 97 — 209. 



I 



IV.] TOURS. . ^9 

ing himself infinitely popular among the market-women 
by his genial, polite ways ; on the best of terms also, 
strange to say, with the prefect; and occasionally receiv- 
ing the visit of some choicer spirit among the English, 
residents or tourists. It was there that he made the ac- 
quaintance, among others, of Francis Hare, an acquaint- 
ance destined to ripen into a friendship which proved one 
of the closest and most fruitful of Landor's life. Hare 
brought to see him at this time Mr., afterwards Sir Rod- 
erick, Murchison, in addressing whom in his old age Lan- 
dor thus pleasantly recalls the circumstances : 

" Upon the bank 
Of Loire thou earnest to me, brought by Hare, 
The witty and warm-hearted, passing through 
That shady garden whose broad tower ascends 
From chamber over chamber ; there I dwelt, 
The flowers my guests, the birds my pensioners, 
Books my companions, and but few beside." 

After the escape of Napoleon from Elba the English 
colony at Tours broke up in alarm ; but Landor, on his part, 
wrote to Carnot, saying that he proposed to remain ; re- 
ceived in answer a courteous assurance of protection ; and, 
in fact, stayed unmolested at Tours throughout the Hun- 
dred Days. After the catastrophe of Waterloo he one day 
saw dismount, in the courtyard of the prefect's house, a 
traveller in whom he recognized, or at least always after- 
wards imagined that he had recognized, the fugitive Em- 
peror himself. 

France under the restored Bourbons had no charms for 
Landor. His wife and his brother Robert were now with 
him. The latter had a strong desire to visit Italy ; Lan- 
dor insisted that they should travel together; and in the 
month of September, 1815, "after contests with his land- 



80 LANDOR. [chap. 

lady of the most tremendous description," they set off ac- 
cordingly. They posted through France to Savoy, along 
a route beset on the right hand by the French forces, and 
on the left by the German army of occupation. An ac- 
count of their journey is preserved in the letters vs^ritten 
by Robert Landor to his mother — letters which betoken 
some measure both of chivalrous prejudice in favour of 
the pretty, reconciled, and now, as it would appear, some- 
what ostentatiously meek and submissive sister-in-law, and 
of brotherly impatience with Walter's moods and caprices. 
When the travellers had made their way as far as Savoy, Lan- 
dor found himself enchanted with the scenery of that prov- 
ince, and for a moment thought of fixing his abode at 
Chambery, but finally decided to push on into Italy. Before 
the end of the jenr he had arrived with his wife at Como, 
where he found himself disappointed and discontented at 
first, but where, after a time, he determined to settle down. 
At Como Landor and his wife continued to live for the 
next three years. Before the summer of tha third a boy 
was born to them, their first child, whom Landor chris- 
tened Arnold Savage, after that Speaker of the House of 
Commons whom he conceived to be an ancestor of his 
own by the mother's side ; other children, a girl and two 
more boys, followed within a few years. Landor delight- 
ed in the ways and company of children, and is the author 
of some of the most beautiful of all sayings about them. 
His own, as long as they were of tender age, were a source 
of extreme happiness to hira ; and their presence had for 
some years the effect of bringing peace at any rate, al- 
though no real concord, into his home relations. For the 
rest, in his life at Como as in his life at Llanthony, and in- 
deed at all times, Landor was never so much taken up by 
anything as by his own reflexions ; and no company was 



ir.] COMO. SI 

so real to him as that with which he associated in imagi- 
nation during his daily walks and nightly musings. In 
the way of practical contact with men during the period 
while he lived at Como there is not much to tell. Among: 
his few visitors from abroad was " the learned and modest 
Bekker;" and he speaks of the "calm and philosophical 
Sironi" as his most frequent companion among the na- 
tives of the place. He had also some acquaintance in 
1817 with an Englishman then resident near the lake, Sir 
Charles Wolseley, afterwards conspicuous as one of the 
leaders of the Birmingham reform agitation. They were 
both witnesses to the scandalous life led by the Princess 
of Wales in the villa on the lake where she was then re- 
siding ; and Landor was, or imagined himself to be, sub- 
ject to some insult or annoyance from those of her suite. 
"This alone," he wrote three years afterwards in his chiv- 
alrous way, when the same Sir Charles Wolseley brought 
forward his name as that of one in a position to give valu- 
able evidence on her trial, " this alone, which might create 
and keep alive the most active resentment in others, would 
impose eternal silence on me." Of these and other mat- 
ters Landor wrote frequently to South ey, whom he also 
kept supplied with presents of books, collected chiefly in 
the course of excursions to Milan. On his own account 
Landor was never much of a book collector, or rather he 
never kept many of the books he bought, but mastered, 
meditated, and then gave them away. It was always a 
matter of remark how disproportionate was the extent of 
his library to that of his reading; In the summer of 1817 
Landor received a visit at Como from Southey in person. 
" Well do I remember," he makes Southey say in one of 
his subsequent Imaginary Conversations — " well do I re- 
member our long conversations in the silent and solitary 



82 LANBOR. [chap. 

churcli of Sant' Abondio (surely the coolest spot in Italy), 
and how often I turned back my head towards the open 
door, fearing lest some pious passer-by, or some more dis- 
tant one in the wood above, pursuing the pathway that 
leads to the tower of Luitprand, should hear the roof echo 
with your laughter at the stories you had collected about 
the brotherhood and sisterhood of the place." 

But Southey's spirits were on this occasion not what 
they had been in the old Llanthony days. He had lost 
his son Herbert, the darling of his heart, twelve months 
before, and had since suffered extreme vexation from the 
attacks and the rebuffs which he had undergone in con- 
nexion with the piratical publication of his Wat Tyler, 

" Grief had swept over hira ; days darken'd round : 
BellagiOjValintelvi, smiled in vain, 
And Monte Rosa from Helvetia far 
Advanced to meet us, mild in majesty 
Above the glittering crests of giant sons 
Station'd around ... in vain too ! all in vain." 

Landor's stay at Como was brought to a characteristic 
termination in the autumn of 1818. An Italian poet, 
Monti, had written some disparaging verses against Eng- 
land. Landor instantly retorted with his old school-boy 
weapons, and printed some opprobrious Latin verses on 
Monti, who summoned him before the local courts on a 
charge of libel. Thereupon he wrote to threaten the mag- 
istrate with a thrashing. For this he was ordered to quit 
the country. The time allowed him expired on the 19th 
of September. '* I remained a week longer, rather wishing 
to be sent for to Milan." No such result ensuing, he re- 
treated in a stately manner on the 28th, discharging more 
Latin verses as he went, this time against the Austrian 
Governor, Count Strasoldo. The next two months he 



I 



IV.] PISA. 83 

spent in a villa rented from the Marchese Pallavacini, at 
Albaro, near Genoa. Before the close of the vear he had 
gone on with his family to Pisa. 

At Pisa, with the exception of one summer, the first 
after his arrival, which he spent at Pistoia, Landor re- 
mained until September, 1821. It is a singular accident 
in the history of the famous little Tuscan city, that it 
should have been chosen by three of the most illustrious 
of modern Englishmen for their abode almost at the same 
time. Shelley established himself there in January, 1820, 
a year later than Landor; Byron in October, 1821, a 
month after Landor had left. With neither of these 
brother poets had Landor any personal acquaintance. The 
current slanders against Shelley's character, especially in 
connexion with the tragic issue of his first marriage, had 
been repeated to Landor by Mackintosh in a form which 
prevented him from seeking the younger poet's acquaint- 
ance, or even accepting it when it- was offered, while they 
were both at Pisa. This Landor afterwards bitterly re- 
gretted. He had the heartiest admiration for Shelley's 
poetry, and learned, when it was too late, to admire his 
character no less. We cannot doubt that the two would 
have understood each other if they had met, and that 
between Landor, the loftiest and most massive spirit of 
his age, and Shelley, the most beautiful and ardent, there 
would have sprung up relations full of pleasure for them- 
selves and of interest for posterity. For Byron, on the 
other hand, Landor had little admiration and less esteem. 
He had gone out of his way to avoid meeting him once in 
England. Neither is it certain that personal intercourse 
would have led to an improved understanding between 
them. Lander's fastidious breeding might easily have 
taken umbrage at the strain of vulgarity there was in By- 



84 LANDOR. [chap. 

ron ; his pride at the other's trick of assumption ; his sin- 
cerity at the other's affectations ; especially if Byron had 
chosen to show, as he often did show with new acquaint- 
ances, his worst side first. And circumstances soon arose 
which would have made friendly intercourse between them 
harder than ever. 

But before coming to these, it is necessary to fix in our 
minds the true nature of Landor's position, intellectual 
and personal, towards the two opposite parties into which 
the chief creative forces of Eno;lish literature were at this 
time divided. One of these was a party of conservation 
and conformity, the other of expansion and revolt. To 
the conservative camp belonged the converted Jacobins, 
Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, and, starting from a 
different point of departure, Scott ; while the men of rev- 
olution were first of all Byron, now in the full blaze of 
his notoriety and his fame, and Shelley, whose name and 
writings were still comparatively unknown. The work 
of all creative spirits tends in the long-run towards ex- 
pansion ; towards the enrichment of human lives and the 
enlargement of human ideals. Wordsworth by his reve- 
lation of the living affinities between man and nature, and 
of the dignity of simple joys and passions, Coleridge by 
introducing into the inert mass of English orthodoxy and 
literalism the leaven of German transcendental speculation, 
Scott by l^indling the dormant sympathy of the modern 
mind with past ages, lives, and customs, were perhaps each 
in his way doing as much to enrich the lives and enlarge 
the ideas of men as either Shelley, with his auroral visions 
of -an emancipated future for the race, or Byron with his 
dazzling illustration of the principle of rebellion in his 
own person. But so far as contains the religious, political, 
and social forms surrounding them, the creative spirits, 






IV.] PISA. 85 

with the exception of a few who, like Keats, stand apart, 
"and simply sing the most heart -easing things," divide 
themselves, like other men, into two parties, one seeing 
nothing keenly but the good, and the other nothing keen- 
ly but the evil, in what is — one fearing all, and the other 
hoping all, from change. The natural position of Landor 
was midway between the two. On the one hand, he was 
incapable of such parochial rusticity and narrowness as 
marked the judgments of Wordsworth in matters lying 
outside the peculiar kindling power of his genius ; or of 
such vague, metaphysical reconciliations between the exist- 
ing and the ideal as contented Coleridge ; or of Southey's 
blind antagonism to change ; or of Scott's romantic par- 
tiality for feudal and kingly forms and usages. But, on 
the other hand, Landor saw human nature not in the ethe- 
real, disembodied, iridescent semblance which it bore to 
the imagination of Shelley, but in its practical attributes 
of flesh and blood, and his watchwords by no means in- 
cluded, like those of the younger poet, the universal indig- 
nant rejection of all hereditary beliefs and bondages to- 
gether. Neither did Landor, in sharing Byron's hatred 
of political tyranny and contempt for conventional judg- 
ments, indulge in anything like Byron's clamorous parade 
or cynic recklessness, but upheld and cherished whatever 
was really respectable in respectability, and maintained in- 
violate his antique principle of decorum even in rebellion. 
In spite of the turbulent reputation he had earned by his 
various collisions with authority, Landor regarded himself, 
to use his own words, as " radically a conservative in every- 
thing useful." In the matter of religious belief and prac- 
tice he is commonly spoken of as a pagan, but his habits 
of thought were rather what are now-a-days termed posi- 
tive ; that is to say, he held the ultimate mysteries of the 



8(5 LANDOR. [chap. 

universe insoluble either by theology or philosophy, and 
estimated creeds and doctrines simply according to their 
effect on human happiness. 

" Divinity is little worth having, much less paying for, unless she 
teaches humanity. The use of religion on earth is to inculcate the 
moral law ; in other words, in the words of Jesus Christ, to love our 
neighbour as ourselves." 

And again, in setting practical over doctrinal religion : 

" Christianity, as I understand it, lies not in belief but in action. 
That servant is a good servant who obeys the just orders of his mas- 
ter; not he who repeats his words, measures his stature, or traces 
his pedigree." 

Accepting Christianity in this sense, Landor was never 
tired of enforcing the contrast between the practical re- 
ligion of the gospels and the official and doctrinal religion 
of priests and kings. In like manner as regards philoso- 
phy ; for abstract and metaphysical speculations he had no 
sympathy, scarcely even any toleration. 

" The business of philosophy is to examine and estimate all those 
things which come within the cognizance of the understanding. 
Speculations on any that lie beyond are only pleasant dreams, leav- 
ing the mind to the lassitude of disappointment. They are easier 
tfttin geometry and dialectics ; they are easier than the efforts of a 
well-regulated imagination in the structure of a poem." 

To the same purport, Diogenes is made to reply to Plato : 

" I meddle not at present with infinity or eternity ; when I can 
comprehend them, I will talk about them. You metaphysicians kill 
the flower-bearing and fruit-bearing glebe with delving, and turning 
over, and sifting, and never bring up any solid and malleable mass 
from the dark profundity in which you labour. The intellectual 
world, like the physical, is inapphcable to profit and incapable of 
cultivation a little wav below the surface," 



IV.] PISA. 87 

Neither coald Landor admit that philosophy, even in the 
sense above defined, that is philosophy dealing with the 
facts of life and experience, could be profitably pursued 
apart from directly practical issues. Human welfare, and 
not abstract truth, should be its aim. 

"This is philosophy, to make remote things tangible, common 
things extensively useful, useful things extensively common, and to 
leave the least necessary for the last. . . . Truth is not reasonably the 
main and ultimate object of philosophy; philosophy should seek 
truth merely as the means of acquiring and propagating happiness." 

In politics Landor was by no means the mere rebel 
which a saying of Carlyle's, repeated by Emerson, has 
tended to represent him. He was, indeed, the staunchest 
friend of liberty — understanding by liberty the right of 
every human being "to enjoy his reason for the promo- 
tion of his happiness" — and the most untiring enemy of 
all forms of despotism, usurpation, persecution, or corrup- 
tion which in his view interfered with that right. Beyond 
this, he was far from being in any general sense a political 
innovator or leveller. With democracy he had no sym- 
pathy, regarding that majority of all ranks, whom he called 
"the vulgar," as of infinitely less importance in a com- 
monwealth than its two or three great men. "A mob," he 
says, " is not worth a man." Accordingly, he was no great 
believer in popular suffrage, and would on no account con- 
descend to personal contact with it^s processes and instru- 
ments. He prided himself on never having made use of 
the votes which he possessed in four counties, or entered 
a club, or been present at a political meeting. Revolu- 
tionist as he was in regard to the despotic governments 
of the continent, convinced as he always continued to be 
of the schoolboy doctrine of the virtue of tyrannicide, he 



88 LANDOR. [chap. 

advocated no very sweeping reforms in tLe politics of his 
native countrv. He would " chano-e little, but correct 
much." He believed greatly in the higb qualities of his 
own order, the untitled gentry of England, and was fond 
of scheming such a reform of the peerage as should con- 
vert that body from a more or less corrupt and degenerate 
oligarchy into a genuine aristocracy of worth and talent. 
He was, as we have seen, a great denouncer of what he 
thought the trucklings, derogations, and quackeries of or- 
dinary political practice and partisanship ; but his chief 
practical exhortations were against wars of conquest and 
annexa^bion ; against alliance with the despotic powers for 
the suppression of insurgent nationalities ; against the 
over-endowment of ecclesiastical dignitaries; in favour of 
the removal of Catholic disabilities ; in favour of factory 
acts, of the, mitigation of the penal laws, and of ecclesias- 
tical and agrarian legislation for the relief of the Irish. 

If Landor by his general opinions thus stood midway 
between the conservative and revolutionary groups of his 
contemporaries, we have seen already on which side of the 
two his literary sympathies were engaged. He belonged 
to the generation of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and 
Charles Lamb, and had grown up in admiration of the 
writings of the so-called Lake school for years before their 
light was dimmed by the younger star of Byron. At the 
same time, Landor was essentially the reverse of a parti- 
san ; his literary judgments were perfectly open, and he 
was nobly eager to acknowledge merit whenever he could 
perceive it. If he can be charged with partisanship in 
any instance, it is in that of Southey, whom he placed as 
a poet not only far above his young antagonist Byron, 
but above Wordsworth, also. For this mistake, Landor's, 
loyal and devoted friendship is undoubtedly in part re- 



IV.] PISA. 89 

sponsible. As between Southey and Byron, however, we 
must remember that the excellencies of the one and the 
faults of the other were precisely of the kind most cal- 
culated to impress Landor. He looked in literature first 
of all to the technical points of form and workmanship. 
Southey was one of the soundest and most scrupulous of 
workmen ; Byron one of the most impetuous and lax ; 
and considering how rarely poets have ever judged aright 
of each other, how hard it is for any man ever to judge 
aright of a contemporary, we shall not too much wonder 
if Landor failed to see that the skilful, versatile, level, 
industrious poetry of Southey contained nothing which 
would strongly interest a second generation, while that of 
the other, with its glaring faults, its felicities that seem so 
casual even when they are most irresistible, its headlong 
current over rough and smooth, was the utterance of a 
personality that would impress and fascinate posterity to 
the latest day. 

All these relations of Landor to his contemporaries 
come into the light in the course of his correspondence 
and his work at Pisa. His intercourse with Southey, in 
the shape of letters and consignments of books, is as close 
as ever. We find him also in correspondence with Words- 
worth himself, on terms of great mutual respect and cour- 
tesy. On the literary controversies of the hour Landor 
printed some just and striking observations, although in 
a form which prevented them from making any impres- 
sion on the public mind, in a book published at Pisa in 
1820. This was the volume called Idyllia Heroica, con- 
taining the carefully matured fruits of all his Latin studies 
and exercises during many years past. The earlier Oxford 
edition, printed, as we have seen, about the time Landor 
was leaving Llanthony, had contained, besides other mis- 
G 5 



90 LANDOR. [chap. 

cellaneous matter, five heroic tales or idyls in hexameter 
verse ; this Pisa edition contains ten, most of which Lan- 
.dor afterwards turned into English for his volume entitled 
Hellenics, and upwards of fifty sets of hendecasyllabics. 
Like all the really original writing of the moderns in this 
language, Landor's Latin poems are not easy reading. His 
style is completely personal, as indeed we should expect 
from a scholar who used Latin often by preference for the 
expression of his most intimate thoughts and feelings; it 
does not recall the diction or cadences of any given mas- 
ter; it is not perfectly free from grammatical and proso- 
dial slips ; but it is remarkably spontaneous, energetic, and 
alive. The volume concludes with a long critical essay, 
developed from the Qucestiuncula of 1803, on the cultiva- 
tion and use of Latin — De cultu atque usu Latini ser- 
monis. 

This essay contains much that would, if Landor had 
only written it in his noble English instead of his only 
less noble Latin, have counted among his most interesting 
work. He has written, he says, because too much leisure 
is prejudicial alike to virtue and to happiness; and he 
has published his work in Italy because he desires to avoid 
being confounded by those among whom he is sojourning 
with the promiscuous crowd of travelling Englishmen {quia 
nolui turmalis esse, nolui opinione hominum cum cceteris 
Britannorum pey^egrinantium, cujuscumque sint ordinis, 
conturhari). His avowed purpose is the paradoxical one 
of pleading for the Latin language as that proper to be 
used by all civilized nations for the expression of their 
most dignified and durable thoughts. Why should those 
be called the dead languages which alone will never die? 
Why should any one choose to engrave on glass when it 
is open to him to engrave on beryl-stone ? What literary 



IV.] IDYLLIA HEROICA. 91 

pleasure can be so great to a man as that of composing 
in the language of his earliest and most fruitful lessons? 
English, even English, may decay, for there are signs 
abroad of the decadence of England's polity, and that of 
her language cannot fail to follow ; but Latin has survived 
and will continue to survive all the vicissitudes of time. 
And much more to the same effect; to which is added a 
condensed critical narrative of the history of Latin poetry 
since the Renaissance, bespeaking a prodigious familiarity 
with a literature to most people neither familiar nor inter- 
esting. This is interspersed with criticisms, in like man- 
ner succinct and authoritative, on the principal poets of 
ancient Rome, and with many searching observations, both 
general and analytic, on the poets and poetry of England. 
Landor has also his fling at France, remarking how the 
once vaunted Henriade of Voltaire has sunk to the level 
of a lesson-book for teaching heroic metre — and heroic 
patience — to the young; but contrasting, on the other 
hand, the treatment of poets in France, where every man 
takes to himself a share of their glory, with their treat- 
ment in England, where no man will tolerate any poetic 
glory except his own. In the course of the discussion 
Landor finds occasion for several of his striking sentences 
— as this, that every great poet is in some sort the creator 
of that man who appreciates the delights of the Paradise 
prepared by him {magnus poeta quisque creator hominis 
istius qui, liceat ita dicerSy Paradiso suo fruatur). 

With reference to the English writers of his own day, 
Landor has a fine and, on the whole, a just outburst against 
the Broughams, Jeffreys, and their meaner rivals or satel- 
lites in the trade of criticism as then practised ; followed 
by an apostrophe to Wordsworth — "admirable man, cit- 
izen, philosopher, poet!" — whom neither seclusion, nor 



92 LANDOR. [chap. 

dignity of life, nor the common reverence of men, has 
been able to protect from the virulence of these enemies 
of all good men and writers. And yet, if only he had 
been dead before they v^^ere born, these same traducers 
would have been the foremost to bring their ^incense to 
his tomb. Coming to Byron, Land or begins with the say- 
ing that the greatest poets have in all times been good 
men, and there is no worse mistake than to suppose vice 
the natural concomitant of genius. But most men prefer 
the second-best to the best ; and when there appears a 
writer of talent and fertility, whose life and style are alike 
full of showy faults, he is sure of notoriety and acclama- 
tion. The true advice for him is to mend his morals, to 
be more careful of his style, to control the ardours of his 
temperament, to rush less hastily" into print, and then by 
the time he is forty he may well produce something epi- 
cal and truly great {ingens nescio quid ei vere epicum). 
The passage is far from being either unkind or unjust. 
Southey in the next year quoted it, adding words expres- 
sive of his enthusiastic regard and admiration for its au- 
thor, in a note to the preface of his Vision of Judgment. 
This is the preface in which Southey made his famous 
attack upon Byron and the " Satanic school ;" an attack 
which, with the inconceivably unlucky performance which 
followed it in the shape of an apotheosis of George III. in 
lumbering and lame hexameters, gave Byron, who, as he 
said, " liked a row," an opportunity too good to be lost. 
We all know the consequences. If Southey's attack is 
remembered, it is because of Byron's never-to-be-forgotten 
retort. I speak not of the prose correspondence, in which 
Byron with his sneers and his unfairness makes no such 
honourable figure as his injudicious but sincerely indig- 
nant and perfectly loyal antagonist, but of Byron's own 






IV.] IDYLLIA HEROICA. 93 

poetic, mocking, and immortal Vision. In a note to this 
Byron dealt a passing thrust at the laureate's incongruous 
friend Savagius, or Savage Landor — "such is his grim 
coo-nomen" — " who cultivates much private renown in the 
shape of Latin verses," and whose opinion of his late sov- 
ereign was so strikingly at variance with that of his friend. 
Byron next returned to the charge against Landor in a 
note to The Island. Having in this poem avowedly par- 
aphrased Landor's lines upon a sea -shell in Gebir, which 
he had heard Shelley recite, Byron takes occasion to de- 
clare that he has never read the poem, and to quote Gif- 
ford's opinion that the rest of it is " trash of the worst 
and most insane description." Then again there are the 
well-known lines in Don Juan — 

" And that deep-mouthed Beotian Savage Landor 
Has taken for a swan rogue Southey's gander." 

" Deep-mouthed " is good ; and in all this there was much 
more mischief than malice on Byron's part. His account 
of his real feelings towards Landor is extant, in the diluted 
report of Lady Blessington, as follows : 

" At Pisa a friend told me that Walter Savage Landor had de- 
Glared he either would not or could not read my works. I asked my 
officious friend if he was sure which it was that Landor said, as the 
would not was not offensive, and the could not was highly so. After 
some reflection, he, of course en ami, chose the most disagreeable 
signification ; and I marked down Landor in the tablet of memory 
as a person to whom a co7ip-de-patte must be given in my forthcoming 
work, though he really is a man whose brilliant talents and profound 
erudition I cannot help admiring as much as I respect his character." 

Landor's retort to the Byronic coups-de-patte appeared 
presently in the shape of an apologue, in one of his Con- 
versations, where the personage of Byron is shadowed 



94 LANDOR. [chap. 

forth under that of Mr. George Nelly, an imaginary son 
of Lord Rochester's : 

" Whenever he wrote a bad poem, he supported his sinking fame 
by some signal act of profligacy, an elegy by a seduction, an heroic 
by an adultery, a tragedy by a divorce. On the remark of a learned 
man, that irregularity is no indication of genius, he began to lose 
ground rapidly, when on a sudden he cried out at the Haymarket, 
There is no God. It was then surmised more generally and more 
gravely that there was something in him, and he stood upon his legs 
almost to the last. Say what you will, once whispered a friend of 
mine, there are things in him stroyig as poison, and original as smi." 

The subjects discussed in Landor's Latin essay had 
been literary alone. But other things besides literature 
occupied his thoughts in these years at Pisa. In 1819 
and the following years began the first stirrings of those 
political movements which are not ended yet — the first 
uprisings, after the settlement of 1815, of the spirit of 
liberty and nationality against dynasties and despotisms. 
The Spanish republics of South America had struck for 
freedom against the mother country ; the Spaniards them- 
selves next rose against their king, the restored and per- 
jured Ferdinand ; the flame spread to Italy, where the flag 
of revolt was raised against the Bourbons in Naples and 
the Austrians in Lombardy, and to Greece, where peasant 
and brigand, trader and pirate, women and children, young 
and old, on a sudden astonished the world with deeds of 
desperate and successful heroism against the Turk. All 
these movements Landor followed with passionate sym- 
pathy, and with corresponding detestation the measures 
of the Holy Alliance for their repression, the deliberations 
of the Congress of Verona, and the French invasion of 
Spain. Canning's tentative and half-hearted efforts in the 
cause of liberty he condemned scarcely less than the des- 



IV.] WANDERINGS IN FRANCE AND ITALY. 93 

potic predilections of Castlereagh. He would have had 
England strike everywhere for the oppressed against the 
oppressor. His own Spanish title and decoration Landor 
had indignantly sent back on the violation by Ferdinand 
of his Charter. He now (1821) addressed to the people 
of Italy an essay or oration on representative government, 
written in their own language, which he by this time 
wrote and spoke with freedom, though his speaking accent 
was strongly English to the last. From these years date 
many of the thoughts and feelings to which he gave ex- 
pression daring those next ensuing in his political dialogues. 
Poems like Shelley's Hellas and his Ode to Naples have 
their counterpart in the work of Landor, in two pieces in- 
spired at this time by the European, and especially ' the 
Greek, revolution. One is addressed to Corinth ; the other 
is called Regeneration ; both illustrate the noblest altitudes 
— and, at the same time, it must be said, the curious bald- 
nesses and depressions — of which Landor's poetic thought 
and poetic style were capable. I quote the best part of 
the second. The reference towards the end is to the de- 
struction of the Turkish fleet by Canaris with his two fire- 
ships and handful of men : 

" We are what suns and winds and waters make us ; 
The mountains are our sponsors, and the rills ' 

Fashion and win their nursling with their smiles. 
But where the land is dim from tyranny, 
There tiny pleasures occupy the place 
Of glories and of duties ; as the feet 
Of fabled faeries when the sun goes down 
Trip o'er the grass where wrestlers strove by day. 
Then Justice, call'd the Eternal One above, 
Is more inconstant than the buoyant form 
That bursts into existence from the froth 
Of ever-varying ocean : what is best 



96 



LANDOR. 



[chap. 



Then becomes worst; what loveliest, most deform' d. 

The heart is hardest in the softest climes, 

The passions flourish, the affections die. 

thou vast tablet of these awful truths 

That fillest all the space between the seas, 

Spreading from Venice's deserted courts 

To the Tarentine and Hydruntine mole. 

What lifts thee up ? what shakes thee ? 'tis the breath 

Of God. Awake, ye nations ! spring to life ! 

Let the last work of his right hand appear 

Fresh with his image, Man. Thou recreant slave 

That sittest afar off and helpest not, 

thou degenerate Albion ! with what shame 

Do I survey thee, pushing forth the spunge 

At thy spear's length, in mocking at the thirst 

Of holy Freedom in his agony, 

And prompt and keen to pierce the wounded side. 

Must Italy then wholly rot away 

Amid her slime, before she germinate 

Into fresh vigour, into form again ? 

What thunder bursts upon mine ear ? some isle 

Hath surely risen from the gulphs profound, 

Eager to suck the sunshine from the breast 

Of beauteous Nature, and to catch the gale 

From golden Hermus and Melena's brow. 

A greater thing than isle, than continent, 

Than earth itself, than ocean circling earth, 

Hath risen there ; regenerate Man hath risen. 

Generous old bard of Chios ! not that Jove 

Deprived thee in thy latter days of sight 

Would I complain, but that no higher theme 

Than a disdainful youth, a lawless king, 

A pestilence, a pyre, awoke thy song, 

When on the Chian coast, one javelin's throw 

From where thy tombstone, where thy cradle stood, 

Twice twenty self-devoted Greeks assail'd 

The naval host of Asia, at one blow 

Scattered it into air . . . and Greece was free . . . 

And ere these glories beam'd, thy day had closed. 



IV.] PISA. 97 

Let all that Elis ever saw give way, 

All that Olympian Jove e'er smiled upon : 

The Marathonian columns never told 

A tale more glorious, never Salamis, 

Nor, faithful in the centre of the false, 

Platea, nor Anthela, from whose mount 

Benignant Ceres wards the blessed Laws, 

And sees the Amphietyon dip his weary foot 

In the warm streamlet of the straits below." * 



CHAPTER y. 

LIFE AT FLORENCE THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS. 

[1821—1829.] 

Both in telling of Lander's literary collisions with Byron, 
and in tracing the course of his sympathies with the in- 
surgent populations of Southern Europe, we have been led 
beyond the strict limits of his stay at Pisa. He left that 
city in September, 1821; and left it, strange to say, at 
peace, having had only one slight brush with authority, 
and that only with the censorship of the press, concerning 
a line in one of his Latin poems. He went next to Flor- 
ence, where he established himself with his family in a 
handsome suite of apartments in the Medici palace. Here 
he lived for five years, and for the three following princi- 
pally in a country house, the Villa Castiglione, distant half 
an hour's walk from the same city. 

During these eight years Landor was engaged, to the 
exclusion of nearly all other work, with the production of 
his Imaginary Conversations. The experimental part of 
his literary career had now ended, and the period of solid 
and confident production had begun. He had found the 
form and mode of expression that best suited his genius. 
The idea of writing prose dialogues or conversations be- 
tween illustrious personages of the past was no new one in 
his mind. In the davs of his connexion with Whig jour- 



CHAP, v.] LIFE AT FLORENCE. 99 

nalism, twenty years before, he had oifered to Adair for in- 
sertion in the Morning Chronicle a dialogue between Burke 
and GrenWlle, which had been declined. He had about the 
same time written another between Henry IV. and Arnold 
Savage. After that he had never regularly resumed this 
form of composition until towards the date of his depart- 
ure from Pisa. But it was a form congenial to every habit 
of his mind. The greatness of great characters was what 
most impressed him in the world. Their exploits and suf- 
ferings, their potencies of intellect and will, the operation 
of their influence and example, were for him the essence 
of history. He could not bring himself to regard statisti- 
cal or social facts, or the working of collective or imper- 
sonal forces in human affairs, as deserving from the histo- 
rian any commensurate degree of attention with the lives 
and achievements of individuals. In this temper of hero- 
worship Landor was a true disciple of antiquity, and he re- 
garded the whole field of history from the ancient point 
of view. The extraordinary range and thoroughness of his 
reading made him familiar with all the leading figures of 
Time. His dramatic instinct prompted him to reanimate 
them in thought with the features and the accents of life. 
It was in converse with these mute companions that he 
was accustomed to spend the best part of his days and 
nights. " Even those with whom I have not lived, and 
whom, indeed, I have never seen, affect me by sympathy as 
if I had known them intimately, and I hold with them in 
my walks many imaginary conversations." Elsewhere Lan- 
dor adorns and amplifies in his choicest vein this account 
of his own habits, in order to transfer it to the lips of Pe- 
trarch. "When I was younger I was fond of wandering 
in solitary places, and never was afraid of slumbering in 
woods and grottoes. Among the chief pleasures of my 



100 



LANDOR. 



[chap. 



life, and among the commonest of ray occupations, was the 
bringing before me such heroes and heroines of antiquity, 
such poets and sages, such of the prosperous and the un- 
fortunate, as most interested me by their courage, their 
eloquence, or their adventures. Engaging them in the con- 
versations best suited to their characters, I knew perfectly 
their manners, their steps, their voices : and often did I 
moisten with my tears the models I had been forming of 
the less happy." 

If it was thus an essential habit of Landor's mind to 
think about persons, and dramatically, to think in frag- 
ments, and disconnectedly, was not less so. In his mental 
communion with the heroes and heroines of the past, he 
began by framing for them isolated thoughts and sen- 
tences, led them on next to an interchange of several, and 
added more by degrees until the whole scene was filled 
out. He confesses as much himself, in a metaphor which 
is characteristic also of his tastes as a lover of trees and 
planting. " I confess to you that a few detached thoughts 
and images have always been the beginnings of my works. 
Narrow^ slips have risen up, more or fewer, above the sur- 
face. These gradually became larger and more consoli- 
dated ; freshness and verdure first covered one part, then 
another; then plants of firmer and higher growth, how- 
ever scantily, took their places, then extended their roots 
and branches ; and among them, and around about them, 
in a little while you yourself, and as many more as I de- 
sired, found places for study and recreation." Dialogue 
is a form of literature in which all these peculiarities could 
find play, not only without impediment but with advan- 
tage. Accordingly, Landor was himself astonished at the 
abundance and the satisfaction with which he found him- 
self pouring out his intellectual stores in this form when 



« 



y.] THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS. 101 

he had once begun. He was moved to do so partly 
by the correspondence of Soiithey, who was full at this 
time of a projected book of Colloquies of his own, and 
partly by the conversation and encouragement of Francis 
Hare. Landor had no idea at the outset how far his new 
literary enterprise was destined to carry him. He still 
meditated, as the great work of his life, a history to be 
written either in co-operation with Southey or separately. 
This idea of working in conjunction with Southey, long 
and seriously entertained by Landor, is a signal proof, 
coming from a mind so rooted in independence and self- 
sufficiency as his, of his unbounded and deferential regard 
for his friend. The idea was gradually and naturally 
dropped somewhat later, and Landor conceived instead 
that of writing by himself, in the form of a series of 
letters, a systematic commentary on the history of Eng- 
land from the year 1775. In the meantime he laboured 
impetuously at his dialogues. He had before him the ex- 
amples of many illustrious writers m all ages ; of Plato, 
Xenophon, and Lucian, of Cicero and Boethius, of Eras- 
mus and More; and, among English authors of compar- 
atively recent date, those of Langhorne, Lyttelton, and 
Hurd. It is needless to say that he did not closely fol- 
low, much less imitate, any of his predecessors. He was 
not at first sure of the method to be adopted, and began 
by planning set conversations on particular texts and top- 
ics. This was soon given up, and he wrote according to 
the choice or the preoccupation of the moment. For fear 
of being at any time caught echoing either the matter or 
the manner of any other writer, he used to abstain alto- 
gether from reading before he himself began to compose, 
"lest the theme should haunt me, and some of the ideas 
take the liberty of playing with mine. I do not wish the 



102 LANDOR. [chap. 

children of my brain to imitate the gait or learn any tricks 
of others." By the 9th of March, 1822, he had finished 
fifteen dialogues, and burnt two others which had failed to 
satisfy him. The manuscript of the fifteen he consigned 
not many days later by a private hand to Longmans, to 
whom he at the same time addressed his proposals for 
their publication. 

The parcel was delayed in delivery, and no answer 
reached Landor for more than three months. Long be- 
fore that his impatience had risen to boiling-point. He 
rushed headlong to the direst conclusions. Of course the 
manuscript had been lost; or of course it had been re- 
fused; or both; and it was just like his invariable ill- 
fortune. He was in despair. He took to his bed. He 
swore he would never write another line, and burnt what 
he had got by him already written. " This disappointment 
has brought back my old bilious complaint, together with 
the sad reflection on that fatality which has followed me 
through life, of doing everything in vain. I have, how- 
ever, had the resolution to tear in pieces all my sketches 
and projects, and to forswear all future undertakings. I 
try to sleep away ray time, and pass two -thirds of the 
twenty-four hours in bed. I may speak of myself as of a 
dead man. I will say, then, that these Conversations con- 
tained as forcible writing as exists on earth." 

This was early in June, and it was not until the end of 
August that news of the manuscript at last arrived. In 
the meantime Landor had recovered his equanimity, and 
was busy writing new dialogues and making additions to 
the old. Longmans, in fact, refused the book. A whole 
succession of other publishers to whom it was offered 
either refused it also, or else offered terms which were un- 
acceptable. By this time, however, Landor was again too 



y.] THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS. 103 

deeply engrossed with the work of writing to bestow much 
attention or indignation upon such impediments. He had 
now put everything concerned with the publication into 
the bands of Julius Hare, to whom he was as yet known 
only through his brotber Francis, but who eagerly under- 
took and loyally discharged the task. Hare, then a tutor 
at Trinity College, Cambridge, persuaded a publisher named 
Taylor, with whom he was on terms of personal friend- 
ship, to take up the book ; the profits or losses, if any, to 
be shared equally between author and publisher. Present- 
ly there arose differences between Taylor and Hare about 
the suppression of words or passages which the former 
judged exceptionable. First Wordsworth, then Southey, 
was proposed as umpire in these differences, Southey final- 
ly agreeing to undertake the oflBce ; but even against 
Southey Taylor adhered to some of his objections. All 
this occasioned considerable delay. In the meantime the 
rumour of the forthcoming book aroused no slight degree 
of expectation. As a foretaste of its contents, the critical 
dialogue between Southey and Porson on the merits of 
Wordsworth's poetry was published by agreement in one 
of the monthly reviews in 1823. The best judges were 
interested and struck, and Wordsworth himself much grat- 
ified. Landor's original intention had been to dedicate 
his book to Wordsworth, and his announcement of the 
fact had been received by the poet with the utmost pleas- 
ure. But while the volumes were in the press it seemed 
to Landor that some of his expressions against those in 
authority were stronger than could be pleasing to one of 
Wordsworth's opinions ; so, with courteous explanations, 
he changed his purpose ; and when the book at last ap- 
peared, in 1824, its two volumes were dedicated respec- 
tively, the first to the husband of his wife's sister, Major- 



104 LANDOR. [chap. 

General Stopford ; the second to a soldier of liberty, Gen- 
eral Mina, the champion of the popular cause in Spain. 
In the course of a preface prefixed to the first volume 
Landor describes his present purposes in literature as fol- 
lows: "Should health and peace of mind remain to me, 
and the enjoyment of a country where, if there are none to 
assist, at least there is none to molest me, T hope to leave 
behind me completed the great object of my studies, an 
orderly and solid work in history; and I cherish the per- 
suasion that Posterity will not confound me with the 
Coxes and Foxes of the age." 

In the two volumes thus produced and prefaced, dia- 
logues the most dissimilar in subject, and the most vari- 
ous in the personages introduced, are brought together 
without system or connexion. Lord Brooke and Sir 
Philip Sidney discourse on letters and morality beneath 
the oaks of Penshurst. Richard I. encounters his faithful 
Abbot of Boxley on the road by Hagenau. Southey re- 
cites to Porson the Laodamia of Wordsworth, and they 
criticize its beauties and shortcomings. ^schines and 
Phocion discuss the character of Demosthenes and the 
prospects of Greece on one page, and on the next Queen 
Elizabeth banters Cecil on his slight esteem for poetry and 
poets. General Kleber opens the locket and the letter 
taken from the body of an English oflScer killed in wan- 
tonness by the French during the war in Egypt. Demos- 
thenes discusses policy and oratory with his teacher Eu- 
bulides, and Buonaparte receives the adulations of the 
Senate through its president. Milton converses with An- 
drew Marvel on the forms and varieties of comedy and 
tragedy, and Washington with Franklin on the causes and 
conduct of the war between the American colonies and 
the mother country, and on the political prospects of each 



v.] THE IMAGINARY CONVEHSATIONS. 105 

in the future. Roger Aseham warns his lovely pupil, Lady 
Jane Grey, of the perils that await her after her marriage. 
The wisdom of Bacon and of Hooker are exhibited togeth- 
er, and the worldliness of the one set in contrast to the 
piety of the other. The extravagances of despotism and 
of superstition are set forth in a vein of Aristophanic cari- 
cature in a conversation of Louis XIV. with his confessor. 
Pericles and Sophocles walk and talk amid the new-limned 
and new-carven glories of the Acropolis. The prospects 
of revolutionary Spain and revolutionary Greece, and the 
duties of the European powers to both, are discussed in 
a dialogue of General Lacy with the Cura Merino, and 
another of Prince Mavrocordato with Colocotroni. The 
Scotch philosopher and the Scotch poet, Hume and Home, 
converse of their own problematic relationship, of ortho- 
doxy, and of toleration. Henry VHL intrudes suddenly 
upon his cast-oil wife, Anne Boleyn, in the days just be- 
fore her execution. Cicero moralizes with his brother 
Quinctus concerning life, death, friendship, and glory, on 
the eve of his last birthday. The seditious Tooke wins 
from the Tory Johnson a kindly hearing for his views on 
English language and orthography — views which in fact 
are Landor's own, and the effect of which makes itself 
practically perceived in the spelling both of this and of his 
other published writings, earlier and later. In his own 
person Landor appears as interlocutor in two dialogues ; 
one principally on architecture and gardening, held with 
his landlord at Genoa ; the other on poetry, criticism, and 
Boileau with the French translator of Milton, the Abbe 
Delille. Interspersed are supplementary notes and dis- 
sertations in Landor's customary vein of mingled whim 
and wisdom, of ardent enthusiasm and lofty scorn, all con- 
veyed in the same dignified, sedate, authoritative tones. 
H 



106 LANDOR. [chap. 

Finally, " as a voluntary to close the work," he appends 
the poem on the Greek and Italian revolutions of which 
we have quoted a part above. 

The book made when it appeared no great impression 
on the popular mind, but upon that of students and lovers 
of high literature one as strong, at least, as Landor's friends 
expected. He could no longer be charged with cultivat- 
ing private renown among a select band of admirers. He 
had challenged the general verdict over an extensive field 
of thought and imagination. The verdict of the critics, 
in that age of carping and cudgelling literary partisanship, 
could not be expected to be unanimous, least of all in the 
case of a writer of judgments so decisive and opinions so 
untempered as Landor. Jeffrey only allowed Hazlitt to 
notice the book in the Edinburgh. Review when he had 
ascertained that the enthusiastic opinion which Hazlitt had 
formed of Landor's powers of mind and style, and of the 
beauty of particular dialogues, was qualified by strong dis- 
approval of many of his opinions, especially of his opin- 
ions on Buonaparte ; and even then Jeffrey cut and modi- 
fied his contributor's work, so that the article as it appear- 
ed was of a very mixed character. The Quarterly, b.'^ a 
matter of course, was hostile ; but the sting had been 
taken out of Quarterly hostility by a dexterous stroke of 
friendship on the part of Julius Hare. This was a criti- 
cism which Hare published in the London Review just be- 
fore the appearance of the Quarterly, and in which he an- 
ticipated all the reprehensions of the Tory oracle, putting 
them into the mouth of an imaginary interlocutor whom 
he calls Hargreaves, and represents as a cynical, scribbling 
barrister, and himself traversing and over-riding them. 
From Southey and Wordsworth there came, written on a 
single sheet, a letter of thanks and praise which Landor 



v.] THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS. 101 

greatly cherislied. It was felt and said, among those who 
have the right to speak for futurity, that a new classic had 
arisen. One thing, at any rate, there was no gainsaying, 
and that was the excellence of Landor's English, the 
strength, dignity, and harmony of his prose style, qualities 
in which he was obviously without a living rivaL For the 
first time Landor was able to anticipate a certain measure 
of profit from his work. Both to profit and popularity, 
indeed, he was accustomed to express an indifference which 
was quite sincere ; but the encouragement of his peers 
added a real zest to the continuance of his labours. Al- 
most before the first edition had appeared, he had pre- 
pared materials for its expansion in a second, to consist of 
three volumes instead of two. He kept forwarding cor- 
rections and insertions for the original dialogues, the latter 
including some of the best matter which they contain in 
the form which we now possess. Thus to the dialogue of 
the Ciceros he added the allegory of Truth, the most per- 
fect, I think, next to one (and that also is by Landor), in 
the English language; to that of Lacy and Merino, the 
grandest of all his outbursts concerning the principles of 
English policy abroad ; and even to the brief, high-pitched, 
and high-wrought dialogues of Lady Jane Grey and Anne 
Boleyn, a page or two each. To the passage on Mh. 
George Nelly the death of Byron, which had happened 
about the time of its original publication, induces Landor 
to append this noble palinode : 

"If, before the dialogue was printed, he had performed those ser- 
vices to Greece which will render his name illustrious to eternity, 
those by which he merited such funereal honours as, in the parsimo- 
ny of praise, knowing its value in republics, she hardly would have 
decreed to the most deserving of her heroes ; if, I repeat it, he had 
performed those services, the performance of which I envy him from 



lAP. J] 



108 LANDOR. [chap. 

my soul, and as much as any other does the gifts of heaven he threw 
away so carelessly, never would I, from whatever provocation,, have B! 
written a syllable against him. I had avoided him ; I had slighted 
him ; he knew it. He did not love me ; he could not. While he 
spoke or wrote against me, I said nothing in print or conversation ; 
the taciturnity of pride gave way to other feelings when my friends, 
men so much better and (let the sincerity of the expression be ques- 
tioned by those who are unacquainted with us) so much dearer, so 
much oftener in my thoughts, were assailed by him too intemper- 
ately." 

Landor's materials for his third volume comprised no less 
than twenty dialogues, including one very long, rambling, 
and heterogeneous, between the Due de Richelieu, a vulgar 
Irish woman of title, a general, also Irish, and a virtuous 
English schoolmaster turned sailor. With this were as- 
sociated some of Landor's best brief dialogues of character 
and passion, notably the Roman two of Marcellus with 
Hannibal and Tiberius with Vipsania; several of his mon- . 
umental satires against tyranny and superstition, including 
the terrible dialogue of Peter the Great with his son Alex- 
is, and the playful one of Bossuet and the Duchesse de 
Fontanges ; a discussion between Rousseau and Males- 
herbes, which is one of the best of the modern meditative 
class ; a visit of Joseph Scaliger to Montaigne, the latter a 
personage for whom Landor entertained a peculiar sympa- 
thy and admiration ; and among the ancients a remon- 
strance of the poet Anacreon with the tyrant Polycrates, a 
contrast of the true stoic Epictetus with the false stoic 
Seneca, and a second conversation of Demosthenes and 
Eubulides. Himself Landor introduced as conversing 
with an English and a Florentine visitor on the death and 
the virtues of the Grand Duke Ferdinand of Tuscany, on 
politics and poetry, and especially on the fates and genius 
of Keats and Shelley. 



v.] THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS. 109 

*' If anything could engage me to visit Rome again, to endure the 
sight of her scarred and awful ruins, telling their stories on the 
ground in the midst of bell-ringers and pantomimes ; if I could let 
charnel-houses and opera-houses, consuls and popes, tribunes and car- 
dinals, senatorial orators and preaching friars clash in my mind, it 
would be that I might afterwards spend an hour in solitude, where 
the pyramid of Cestius stands against the wall, and points to the 
humbler tombs of Keats and Shelley. 

" Keats, in his Endymion, is richer in imagery than either [Chaucer 
or Burns] : and there are passages in which no poet has arrived at 
the same excellence on the same ground. Time alone was wanting 
to complete a poet, who already far surpassed all his contemporaries 
in this country in the poet's most noble attributes. . . . We will now 
return to Shelley. Innocent and careless as a boy, he possessed all 
the delicate feelings of a gentleman, all the discrimination of a schol- 
ar, and united, in just degrees, the ardour of the poet with the pa- 
tience and forbearance of the philosopher. His generosity and char- 
ity went far beyond those of any man (I believe) at present in exist- 
ence. He was never known to speak evil of an enemy, unless that 
enemy had done some grievous injustice to another : and he divided 
his income of only one thousand pounds with the fallen and afflicted." 

After expressing his deep regret at the misunderstanding 
which had kept them strangers, Landor concludes : 

"As to what remains of him, now life is over, he occupies the third 
place among the poets of the present age, and is incomparably the 
most elegant, graceful, and harmonious of the prose writers." 

Landor's implied order among the poets in the above 
words is, strange as it may seem, Southey, Wordsworth, 
Shelley. Republishing the conversation twenty years later, 
he varies the last words as follows : 

"He occupies, if not the highest, almost the highest, place among 
our poets of the present age ; no humble station ; and is among the 
most elegant, graceful, and harmonious of the prose writers." 



no LANDOR. [chap. 

With reference to his own position among his fellow- 
writers, Landor is as totally and cordially free from jeal- 
ousy as it is possible for a man to be. At the same time 
he has no doubts ; and the text or notes of these personal 
dialogues occasionally contain a remark in the following 
stately key, " What I write is not written on slate, and no 
finger, not of Time himself, who dips it in the clouds of 
years, can efface it ;" and occasionally a derisive challenge 
to his reviewers — let the sturdiest of them take the ten 
worst of his dialogues, " and if he equals them in ten years 
I will give him a hot wheaten roll and a pint of brown 
stout for breakfast." 

Landor panted for the immediate publication of his new 
edition, but was again foiled by his own impetuosity. 
Some want of tact in a letter of Taylor's,, some slight de- 
lays of payment and correspondence on his part, together 
with the irritation Landor had not unnaturally felt under 
his timorous censorship, led to an outbreak which made 
all future relations between them impossible. Landor's 
annoyance and his suspicions having been inflamed in the 
course of conversation with Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, his 
imagination swiftly added fuel to the fire, and he presently 
exploded, writing to accuse Taylor of every kind of mis- 
conduct, and proclaiming every kind of desperate resolu- 
tion in consequence : " His first villainy instigated me to 
throw my fourth volume, in its imperfect state, into the 
fire, and has cost me nine-tenths of my fame as a writer. 
His next villainy will entail perhaps a chancery suit on my 
children — for at its commencement I blow my brains out. 
This cures me for ever, if I live, of writing what could be 
published ; and I will take good care that my son shall not 
suffer in the same way. Not a line of any kind will I 
leave behind me. My children shall be carefully warned 



v.] THE IMAGINARY CONVEESATIONS. Ill 

against literature." Was ever ancient Roman so forgetful 
of himself ? Was ever overgrown schoolboy so incorrigi- 
ble? 

Landor's "for ever" rarely lasted iriore than a few 
weeks, and it is to his credit that when Julius Hare replied 
to all this with a perfectly manly and straightforward letter 
of remonstrance, justifying his friend Taylor in all but a 
few unimportant particulars, Landor received the rebuke 
in silence, and continued to entrust to Hare the farther ar- 
rangements concerning his book. The materials intended 
for his fourth volume he had, as we have just read, de- 
stroyed. But within a few months more he had produced 
new dialogues enough not only for one, but for two addi- 
tional volumes, and in the meantime another publisher had 
been found in the person of Colburn. Landor's share of 
the profits on his first edition had been a hundred and sev- 
enty pounds odd. For the second edition he received in 
advance two hundred pounds. Its first two volumes ap- 
peared in 1826; the third, the new volume, dedicated to 
Bolivar, not until 1828, and these three volumes were now 
regarded as constituting the "first series" of the work. 
Some fresh slight disagreements having arisen, the fourth 
and fifth volumes, comprising the " second series," were 
entrusted to yet another publisher, Duncan, and appeared 
in 1829. These two new volumes contain between them 
twenty-seven more dialogues of the old diversified charac- 
ter. That of Lucullus and Caesar is the loftiest, most 
thoucrhtful, and urbane, next to that of the two Ciceros, 
among the more tranquil of 'Landor's Roman dialogues. 
The c'onversation of Diogenes and Plato, allowing for the 
peculiar view which Landor had formed of Plato's charac- 
ter and genius, is at once the most pungent and the most 
majestic^ of the Greek. In the dialogue of Metellus and 



112 LANDOR. [cttip. 

Marius at the walls of Numantia, Landor embodies with 
raasterly imagination the inexorable spirit of Roman con- ^ 
quest ; in that of Leofric and Godiva the charm of bridal 
tenderness and the invincibility of womanly compassion ; 
in that of Lady Lisle and Lady Elizabeth Gaunt, con- 
demned to death during the bloody assize for sheltering 
the partisans of Monmouth, the constancy of martyrdom 
and the divine persistence of more than Christian forgive- 
ness. Landor's ovi'n favourite conversation of all was that 
in which the philosopher Epicurus instructs at once in wis- 
dom and in dalliance his girl-pupils Leontion and Ternissa. 
A, scarcely less ideal charm is breathed by Landor over the 
relations of his own contemporary Trelawny with the 
daughter of the Klepht leader Odysseus, in the introduc- 
tion of a dialogue which turns afterwards on the discussion 
of European, and especially of Greek, politics. In a short 
scene between Peleus and Thetis he unites with the full 
charm of Hellenic mythology the full vividness of human 
passion. Satirical conversations between the French min- 
isters Villele and Corbiere, the English Pitt and Canning, 
and the Portuguese Prince Miguel and his mother, give 
vent more or less felicitously to his illimitable contempt 
for the ministers and ruling families of modern states. 

Besides the contents of these five volumes, written and 
published between the years 1821 and 1829, and contain- 
ing in all about eighty Conversations, Landor had before 
the latter date written some twenty more, which he in- 
tended for publication in a sixth. But from one reason 
and another this sixth volume never appeared, and the ma- 
terials which should have composed it were for the most 
part only made public in the collected edition of Landor's 
writings issued in 1846. Counting these, and the increase 
in the number of the original dialogues effected by divid- 



v.] THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS. Us- 

ing some of thera into two, and adding those which he 
wrote afterwards at intervals until the year of his death, 
the total number of Imaginary Conversations left by Lan- 
dor amounts to just short of a hundred and fifty. 

Those written in the eight years now under review in- 
clude, therefore, about two-thirds of the whole. We have 
seen with what ardour and facility, and with what a mis- 
cellaneous selection of speakers and of topics, they were 
produced. Their range extends over the greater part of 
life, literature, and history. Landor himself, and his edi- 
tors after him, devised in the sequel various modes of 
grouping and classifying them ; but none of these classifi- 
cations are satisfactory. Conversations of the Greelcs and 
Romans form, indeed, one distinct historical division, but 
not a division on which it is desirable to insist. It has 
often been said of Landor that he wrote of the Greeks 
more like a Greek, and of the Romans more like a Roman, 
than any other modern, and the saying in my judgment is 
true. But his treatment of other themes is not different 
in kind from his treatment of these, and he has not been 
better inspired by the romance and the example of antiq- 
uity than by the charm of Italy or the glory of England. 
The original title of the two first volumes. Imaginary 
Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen^ by no 
means covered the whole of their contents ; and the edi- 
torial divisions afterwards established by Mr. Forster, viz., 
Greeks and Romans, Soldiers and Statesmen, Literary 
Men, Famous Women, and Miscellaneous, cross and over- 
lap each other in many directions. To my mind the only 
vital and satisfactory division between one class and an- 
other of Landor's prose conversations is that between the 
dramatic and the non -dramatic ; the words are inexact, 
and the distinction is far from being sharp or absolute ; 
6 



114 LANDOR. [chap. 

but what I mean is this, that some of the compositions in 
question are full of action, character, and passion, and 
those I call the dramatic group ; in others there is little 
action, and character and passion are replaced by disqui- 
sition and reflection, and those I call by contrast the non- 
dramatic. In the former class Landor is in each case 
taken up with the creative task of realizing a heroic or 
pathetic situation, and keeps himself entirely in the back- 
ground. In the latter class his energetic personality is 
apt to impose itself upon his speakers, who are often little 
more than masks behind which he retires in order to utter 
his own thoughts and opinions with the greater conven- 
ience and variety. 

The dramatic conversations are mostly brief, and range 
over almost all periods of time. Central examples of the 
class are, from Roman antiquity, the dialogues of Marcel- 
lus and Hannibal, and of Tiberius and Vipsania; from the 
history or historic legend of England, those of Leofric and 
Godiva, of John of Gaunt and Joanna of Kent, of Henry 
VIII. and Anne Boleyn, and of Lady Lisle and Lady Eliz- 
abeth Gaunt ; from the history of France, those of Joan 
of Arc and Agnes Sorel, and of Bossuet and the Duchesse 
de Fontanges ; from that of Italy, the interviews of Dante 
with Beatrice, and of Leonora di Este with Father Pani- 
garola. In these and similar cases Landor merely takes a 
motive suggested by history, being more apt to avoid than 
to make use of any actually recorded incident, and pre- 
ferring to call up, not any scene which to our positive 
knowledge ever was, but only such a scene as might have 
been, enacted, the characters and circumstances being 
given. It is, therefore, from the imaginative and not from 
the literal point of view that his work is to be approach- 
ed. His endeavour is to embody the spirit of historical 



Y.] THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS. 115 

epochs in scenes of whicli the actions and the emotions 
shall be at the same time new and just. In many in- 
stances his success is complete. The spirit, as I have al- 
ready said, of Roman conquest stands typically fixed in a 
dialogue like that of Marius and Metellus; so does the 
spirit of Norman chivalry in one like that of Tancredi and 
Constantia ; and of English honour in that of John of 
Gaunt and the Queen. In the actual dramatic conduct of 
the scenes Landor, in these short compositions, shows a 
creative power and insight equal to that of the very great- 
est masters. Uniting the extreme of force to the extreme 
of tenderness, he pursues and seizes with convincing mas- 
tery the subtlest movements of impassioned feeling. Out 
of the nobility and tenderness of his own heart he imag- 
ines heights and delicacies of those qualities unmatched, 
as I cannot but think, by any English writer except Shak- 
speare. Pitching the emotions of his actors at an ideal 
height, his aim, we must farther remember, is to fix and 
embody them in an ideal cast of language ; language of a 
perfection and a precision which no stress of feeling is al- 
lowed to impair or discompose. The emotion, as thus em- 
bodied in words as it were of marble, Landor leaves always 
as " naked " as possible, as much divested of accident and 
superfluity. Explanations and stage directions of all sorts 
the reader has to supply for himself, the author furnishing 
nothing of that nature except what is to be inferred from 
the bare utterances of his speakers. At the same time 
we are aware that he has himself realized the action of 
every scene with perfect clearness. These high - strung 
dramatic dialogues used to cost Landor in the composi- 
tion both throes and tears. As in the writing of Count 
Julian long ago, so now in that of Tiberius and Vipsania, 
he tells us how he watched and wept over his work by 



116 LAXDOR. [chap. 

night, and Low every feature and gesture of his person- 
ages stood visibly present before his mind's eye. But as 
in Count Julian, so now, he fails occasionally to tahe the 
reader with him. Want of instinctive sympathy with his 
reader is the weak point of Landor's lofty art, and in 
these dialogues he is so perfectly sure of his own way that 
he sometimes forgets to put into our hands the clue which 
we need in order to follow him. But usually nothing- 
more is necessary than a little attention, a little deliberate- 
ness in reading — and work so full and rich is to be read 
attentively and deliberately if at all — in order to make all 
clear. The speeches as they succeed one another then be- 
come to us at the same time both monuments of the emo- 
tions of the actors and landmarks indicating the crisis 
which their actions have reached; and we read between 
the lines how the heart-stricken Thetis has sunk through 
the embrace of Peleus ; how the maidens in the house of 
Xanthus shrank one behind another in inquisitive awe at 
the beauty of Rhodope, the stranger slave from Phrygia ; 
how Marius adventures and returns over blood and ashes 
within the walls of the beleaguered city of Numantia; 
how Zenobia is hurled by her despairing Rhadamistus into 
the eddies of the Araxes ; how Godiva descends from her 
palfrey to kneel and pray when Leofric has sworn his 
cruel oath ; how Dante for the last time rests his fevered 
head upon the maiden bosom of Beatrice ; how Anne 
Boleyn swoons at the unlooked-for entrance of her lord ; 
or how the palace dog is heard lapping as it falls the blood 
of the murdered Czar. Or sometimes the incidents are 
of another kind, and we realize with amusement how the 
venerable Bossuet bustles to pick up his ring lest the 
child-mistress of Louis XIV. should stoop for it; or how 
that monarch himself lets slip by inadvertence into his 



I 



v.] THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS. 11 '7 

breeches the strip of silk which the same prelate and con- 
fessor has enjoined him to place next his skin by way of 
penance. For among the dialogues of this dramatic group 
some are comic, or at least satiric, branding the delin- 
quencies of priests and kings in a vein of Aristophanic or 
Kabelaisian exaggeration. These, however, are seldom 
among Landor's best work, marble being not the most 
suitable material for caricature, nor weight and polish its 
most appropriate excellencies. In general it may be truly 
said of Landor that he rises or falls accordino- to the nature 
of his subject, and is at his best only in the highest things. 
Especially is this true in his treatment of women. Both 
in the physical and the spiritual, Landor's feeling for the 
feminine is as strong as it is exquisite; there is no writer, 
Shakspeare alone once more excepted, who surpasses him 
in it. Hardly Perdita or Imogen themselves are made 
more beautiful to us by words than Landor's maiden image 
of Hope — " her countenance was tinged with so delicate a 
colour that it appeared an effluence of an irradiated cloud 
passing over us in the heavens ;" or than his Greek Thelym- 
nia in her crown of myrtle — " there was something in the 
tint of the tender sprays resembling that of the hair they 
encircled ; the blossoms too were white as her forehead." 
Hardly Imogen again, hardly Cordelia, hardly Desdemona, 
are more nobly realized types of constancy and sweetness, 
of womanly heroism and womanly resignation, than are 
Landor's Joan of Arc or his Anne Boleyn during the brief 
scenes in which they are brought before us. But there is 
one weak point in Landor's dealing with women which 
must not be overlooked. When he comes down from 
these heights, and deals with the every-day timidities of 
young love, and simplicities of girlish feeling, he some- 
times, it must be confessed, goes altogether astra}-, and 



118 LANDOR. [chap. 

strikes the note of false innocence and flirting "arch- 
ness." His young women, including the Greek, are on 
these occasions apt to say " audacious !" " you must be 
a very bold man !" " put me down !" and generally to 
comport themselves in a manner giggly, missish, and dis- 
concerting. 

To give the reader a just idea of Landor's manner in 
this class of his Conversations^ it would be desirable to set 
before him at least two examples, one to illustrate the ex- 
treme of his strength, the other of his delicacy, in dramatic 
imagination. Space failing for this, let us detach an ex- 
ample of an intermediate kind from a dialogue to which 
allusion has several times been made already, that of Leofric 
and Godiva^ beginning at the point where the petitions of 
the tender-hearted bride begin to overbear her lord's ob- 
stinate resentment against his people: 

'■'■Leofric. We must hold solemn festivals. 

Godiva. We must indeed. 

Leofric. Well then ! 

Godiva. Is the clamorousness that succeeds the death of God's 
dumb creatures, are crowded halls, are slaughtered cattle, festivals ? 
Are maddening songs and giddy dances, and hireling praises from 
party-coloured coats? Can the voice of a minstrel tell us better 
things of ourselves than our own internal one might tell us ? or can 
his breath make our breath softer in sleep ? my beloved ! let 
everything be a joyance to us ; it will, if we will. Sad is the day, 
and worse must follow, when we hear the blackbird in the garden 
and do not throb with joy. But Leofric, the high festival is strewn 
by the servant of God upon the heart of man. It is gladness, it is 
thanksgiving, it is the orphan, the starveling prest to the bosom, and 
bidden as its first commandment to remember its benefactor. We 
will hold this festival ; the guests are ready : we may keep it up for 
weeks and months and years together, and always be the happier 
and the richer for it. The beverage of this feast, Leofric, is 
sweeter than bee or flower or vine can give us: it flows from heaven ; 



I 



v.] THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS. 119 

and in heaven will it again be poured out abundantly to him who 
pours it out here abundantly. 

Leofric. Thou art wild. 

Godiva. I have indeed lost myself ; the words are not mine : I 
only feel and utter them. Some Power, some good, kind Power melts 
me (body and soul and voice) into tenderness and love. my hus- 
band, we must obey it. Look upon me ! look upon me ! lift again 
your sweet eyes from the ground ! I will not cease to supplicate ; 
I dare not. 

Leofric. We will think upon it 

Godiva. never say that word ! those who utter it are false men. 
What ! think upon goodness when you can be good ! Let not their 
infants cry for food I the mother of our blessed Lord will hear them ; 
us never afterward. 

Leofric. Here comes the bishop : we are now but one mile from 
the walls. Why dismountest thou ? no bishop can expect it. Godiva, 
my honour and rank among men are humbled by this : Earl Godwin 
will hear of it : up ! up ! the bishop hath seen it : he urgeth his horse 
onward: dost thou not hear him now upon the solid turf behind 
thee? 

Godiva. Never, no, never will I rise, Leofric, until you remit this 
most impious tax, this tax on hard labour, on hard life. 

Leofric. Turn round: look how the fat nag canters, as to the tune 
of a sinner's psalm, slow and hard-breathing. . . . What reason or 
right can the people have to complain while their bishop's steed is so 
sleek and well caparisoned ? Inclination to change, desire to abolish 
old usages. . . . Rise, up for shame ! they shall smart for it, idlers. 
Sir bishop, I must blush for my young bride. 

Godiva. My husband, my husband ! will you pardon the city ? " 

Leofric. 0, sir bishop ! I could not think you would have seen 
her in this plight. Will I pardon ? yea, Godiva, by the holy rood, 
will I pardon the city when thou ridest naked at noontide through 
the streets. 

Godiva. my dear, cruel Leofric, where is the heart you gave 
me ? It was not so ! Can mine have hardened it ? 

Bishop. Earl, thou abashest thy spouse ; she turneth pale and 
weepeth. Lady Godiva, peace be with thee. 

Godiva. Thanks, holy man ! peace will be with me when peace 
is with your city. Did you hear my lord's hard word ? 



120 LANDOR. [chap. 

Bishop. I did, lady. 

Godiva. Will you remember it, and pray against it ? 

Buhcp. Wilt thou forget it ? 

Godiva. I am not offended, 

BisJiop. Angel of peace and purity ! 

Godiva. But treasure it up in your heart. Deem it an incense ; 
good only when it is consumed and spent, ascending with prayer and 
sacrifice. And now what was it ? 

Bishop. Christ save us ! that he will pardon the city when thou 
ridest naked through the streets at noon. 

Godiva. Did he not swear an oath ? 

Bishop. He sware by the holy rood. 

Godiva. My Redeemer ! thou hast heard it ! save the city ! 

Leofric. We are upon the beginning of the pavement : these are 
the suburbs : let us think of feasting: we may pray afterward: to- 
morrow we shall rest. 

Godiva. No judgments then to-morrow, Leofric ? 

Leofric. None : we will carouse. 

Godiva. The saints of heaven have given me strength and con- 
fidence : my prayers are heard : the heart of my beloved is now 
softened. 

Leofric. Ay, ay, 

Godiva. Say, dearest Leofric, is there indeed no other hope, no 
other mediation ? 

Leofric. I have sworn. Besides, thou hast made me redden and 
turn my face away from thee, and all these knaves have seen it. 
This adds to the city's crime. 

Godiva. I have blushed, too, Leofric, and was not rash nor 
cruel. 

Leofric. But thou, my sweetest, art given to blushing ; there is 
no conquering it in thee. I wish thou hadst not alighted so hastily 
and roughly: it hath shaken down a sheaf of thy hair: take heed 
not to sit upon it, lest it anguish thee. Well done ! it mingleth now 
sweetly with the cloth of gold upon the saddle, running here and 
there as if it had life and faculties and business, and were working 
thei^eupon some newer and cunninger device. my beauteous Eve ! 
there is a paradise about thee ! the world is refreshed as thou movest 
and breathest on it. ... I cannot see or think of evil where thou art. 
I would throw my arms even here about thee, ... No signs for me ! 



v.] THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS. 121 

no shaking of sunbeams ! no reproof or frown or wonderment. . . . 
I will say it . . . now then for worse. ... I would close with my kisses 
thy half-open lips, ay, and those lovely and loving eyes, before the 
people. 

Oodiva. To-morrow you shall kiss me, and they shall bless 
you for it. I shall be very pale, for to-night I must fast and 
pray. 

Leofric. I do not hear thee ; the voices of the folks are so low 
under this archway. 

Oodiva (to herself). God help them ! good kind souls ! I hope 
they will not crowd about me so to-morrow. Leofric ! could my 
name be forgotten, and yours alone remembered. But perhaps my 
innocence may save me from reproach . . . and how many as inno- 
cent are in fear and famine ! No eye will open on me but fresh from 
tears. What a young mother for so large a family ! Shall my youth 
harm me ? Under God's hand it gives me courage. Ah, when will 
the morning come ? ah, when will the noon be over ?" 

The second class of Landor's dialogues, the dialogues 
of discussion and reflexion, are both much more numerous, 
and individually, for the most part, much longer than those 
of which I have thus far spoken. They also range over 
almost the whole field of history, and include several of 
the satiric kind, in which modern statesmen are generally 
the speakers. The description non-dramatic must not be 
taken too strictly, inasmuch as Landor often introduces 
and concludes a purely discursive and reflective dialogue 
with passages of pleasant intercourse and play of feeling, 
and sometimes enlivens the whole course of the discussions 
with such accompaniments. Or, again, he grasps and re- 
alizes, in a way that may fairly be called dramatic, whether 
it coincides with our historical ideas or not, the character 
of this or that individual speaker. But at least as often 
either one of the speakers or both are mere mouthpieces 
for the utterance of Landor's own thoughts and senti- 
ments. He expressly warns his readers, indeed, against 
• I 6* 



122 LANDOR. [chap. 

taking for his own any of the opinions put into the 
mouths of his personages ; but the reader familiar with 
Landor's other writings and with his correspondence will 
have no difficulty in recognizing where the living man ex- 
presses himself behind the historic mask. Thus we know 
that it is Landor himself who is contending for toleration 
and open-mindedness in matters of religious faith, alike 
in the person of Lucian and in that of Melanchthon ; for 
simplicity and integrity of thought and speech in those of 
Diogenes and of Epictetus. It is Landor who transports 
himself in imagination into the gardens of Epicurus, and 
holds delightful converse with Leontion and Ternissa ; it 
is Landor who, through the mouths of Anacreon and of 
the priest of Ammon, rebukes the ambition of Polycrates 
and of Alexander. Landor behind the mask of Andrew 
Marvel glorifies against the time-serving archbishop the 
great poet of the English republic, and Landor dictates the 
true policy of his country through the lips of the Greek 
or Spanish revolutionary leaders. It is the greatest trib- 
ute to the range of his powers and of his knowledge that 
he could adapt his thoughts to so great a diversity of ages 
and characters without too obvious a forfeiture of verisi- 
militude in any given case. 

Landor's whole treatment of Plato is very characteristic 
of his way of thinking and working. He would accept 
no secondhand verdict in matters either of literature or 
life ; and when he had examined any matter for himself, 
was none the worse pleased if he found his judgment run- 
ning counter to the received opinion. Although theoret- 
ically he disliked and despised paradox, he was certainly 
" well content," as Emerson puts it, " to impress his Eng- 
lish whim upon the immutable past," and to refashion 
ancient glories in a mould of his own construction. At 



v.] THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS. 123 

Florence lie went, he tells us, every morning for a long- 
while to the Magliabecchian Library, and read the whole 
works of Plato through. Considering what the works of 
Plato are, and that Landor was by no means a perfectly 
accomplished Greek scholar, it is evident that his reading 
must have been perfunctory. But it was enough to in- 
spire him with a great distaste, and a considerable portion 
of contempt, for that illustrious author. Landor was never 
blind to genius, but in the genius of Plato he saw and 
noted little except the flaws and singularities. He has 
carefully collected, apart from their connexion, examples 
of everything that is practically unreasonable in Plato's 
views of civil government; of everything that is fantastic 
in his allegories, captious in his reasonings, and ambiguous 
or redundant in his diction. He has made Plato cut a 
figure both pretentious and ridiculous in his intercourse 
with Diogenes, who lectures him on style and on morals, 
reproves his want of simplicity and independence, dis- 
charges at him a whole artillery of wise and beautiful say- 
ings in Landor's own finest manner, and even knocks out 
of his hand his especial weapons of poetical eloquence, out- 
doing him with a passage of splendid rhetoric on the noth- 
ingness and restlessness of human power as compared with 
the power of the gentlest of the elements, the air. Nei- 
ther is Landor content with this discomfiture of Plato at 
the hands of his contemporary philosopher of the tub ; he 
returns to the charge where we should least have expected 
it, and in a dialogue of Lord Chatham with Lord Chester- 
field makes the great statesman turn the conversation on 
ancient philosophy, and edify his visitor with an exposi- 
tion of the faults and fallacies which he has found in Plato. 
This unexpectedness, which is yet not the same thing as 
paradox, this preference for, and habit of lighting on, the 



;24 LANDOR. [chap. 

thing indictum ore alio, is an essential part of Landor's 
genius. 

To return to the general character of these Conversa- 
tions, their weakness lies in Landor's inaptitude alike for 
close or sustained reasoning, and for stirring or rapid 
narrative ; his characters seldom attempt argument, and 
almost as often as they attempt story - telling, they fail. 
The true strength of the discursive Conversatioris resides 
in the extraordinary richness, the originality of the reflex- 
ions, and meditative depth and insight scattered through 
them — reflexions generally clenched and illuminated by 
images, and adding the quality of beauty to the qualities 
of solid ingenuity or wisdom. Some of the dialogues are 
filled almost from beginning to end with such reflexions. 
In some they are few and far between. Sometimes they 
are set in a framework of graceful incident, and amidst 
beautiful magnanimities and urbanities of intercourse ; 
sometimes they have to be sought out through a maze 
of more or less tedious disquisitions, confused anecdotes, 
and unsuccessful witticisms. Occasionally Landor spoils 
an otherwise admirable dialogue of antiquity by intruding 
into it a sarcastic apologue against some object of his po- 
litical aversion in the modern world. Occasionally he 
makes his personages discuss with much fulness and ro- 
tundity of speech questions of learning and of curiosity 
that can be interesting only to himself ; in a word, he does 
that which he was so keenly sensible of Wordsworth's 
mistake in allowing himself to do — he drones. It is a 
classical, and from the point of view of ^yle an exemplary, 
form of droning, but it is droning still. To the lover of 
fine thoughts there is not one of these dialogues which it 
is not worth his while to read through and through for 
the sake of the jewels it contains. But there are not 



v.] ^HE IMAGIKAIIY CONVERSATIONS. 125 

many which, like the dialogues of Diogenes and Plato, of 
the two Ciceros, of Marvel and Archbishop Parker, he can 
recommend to the ordinarily intelligent reader in the con- 
fidence that he will not be fatigued before the end. It 
should be said, however, that the appetite for Landor al- 
ways grows with the reading. The mansions of his mind 
are so various, and the riches treasured up in them so vastj 
that if they contain some chill and musty corridors we 
may well be content to traverse these too with patience; 
When Landor is good, he is so admirably and so originally 
good, so full of crushing and massive force on one page, 
and of a delicacy surpassing that of the tenderest poets on 
another, that to know him well repays tenfold whatevei* 
hours of weariness his weak places cost. He never em- 
phasizes or separates his own good sayings, but delivers 
himself of his best and of his worst with the same com- 
posure and completeness. 

During these eight years of sustained and, on the whole, 
victorious literary effort, the outward life of Landor had 
not failed to exhibit the usual contrasts between his doc- 
trine and his practice. The author of the maxim " neither 
to give nor to take offence is surely the best thing in life," 
had been taking and giving offence as superfluously as 
ever. We have already witnessed the bursting of two 
storms in the course of his relations with his publishers ; 
others had gathered nearer home. Landor had found or 
invented cause of dudgeon against members both of the 
English embassy and of the native magistrature at Flor- 
ence. He had, it is said, challenged a secretary of legation 
for whistling in the street when Mrs. Landor passed, and 
had written a formal complaint to the Foreign Office con- 
cerning the character of "the wretches they employed 
abroad." He had persuaded himself that he was a man 



126 LANDOR. [chap. 

marked out for petty persecution by the agents of author- 
ity both in Italy and England. He was on terms of per- 
manent misunderstanding with the police. Some of the 
expressions and anecdotes concerning Florentine society 
which he had introduced into one of his first Conversations 
had been translated, and had farther helped to plunge him 
in hot water. With his lofty standards of honour and 
veracity, of independence and decorum, he had indeed con- 
ceived a sovereign contempt for the character, if not of the 
Italian people in general, at any rate of the city popula- 
tion in the midst of which he lived. His arbitrary indig- 
nations and eccentricities made him seem to them, on his 
part, the most ideally mad of all mad Englishmen. His 
residence at the Medici palace was brought to an untimely 
end by a quarrel with his landlord, a marquis bearing the 
historic name of the house. Landor imagined that this 
marquis had unfairly seduced away his coachman, and 
wrote to complain accordingly. The next day the mar- 
quis came strutting with his hat on into the room where 
Mrs. Landor was sitting with some visitors. "He had 
scarcely," writes one of these, " advanced three steps from 
the door, when Landor walked up to him quickly and 
knocked his hat off, then took him by the arm and turned 
him out. You should have heard Landor's shout of laugh- 
ter at his own anger when it was all over; inextinguish- 
able laughter, which none of us could resist." Incidents 
of this kind, however, were too frequent in Landor's life to 
affect him very deeply. His wrath usually exhaled itself 
either in a fit of laughter or an epigram — if anything so 
solid as a Landorian epigram can justly be called an ex- 
halation. At worst a quarrel would sometimes give him 
a bilious attack, or aggravate the annual fit of quinsy to 
which he had by this time become subject. 



v.] LIFE AT FLORENCE. 127 

Domestic and social consolations were not wanting to 
Landor in these days. His conjugal relations continued 
to be for some time endurable, if far from ideal ; while in 
his children, the fourth and last of whom was born in 
1825, he took a constantly increasing delight. He loved 
and cherished them with a passionate, almost an animal- 
intensity of affection. In their games Bahbo was one of 
themselves, the most gleeful and the most riotous of play- 
mates. He could not bear to be parted from them, and 
went half beside himself with anxiety when, during a visit 
to Naples, he heard that some of them were down with 
a childish illness. In his letters to his sisters and his 
mother at home, he made those kindly hearts the partici- 
pators in his parental delights. This home correspondence 
of Landor's never flagged during his mother's life. He 
wrote to her about his doings and about the children, and 
she replied from Warwick or Ipsley with all the gossip of 
the county. Knowing his aversion for business, she did 
not trouble him much with details of his property or ac- 
counts, but was full of plans for his future and that of his 
children. She hoped that when she was gone he would 
come home and settle down to the life of an English coun- 
try gentleman, and that he would get as much enjoyment 
out of Ipsley as she had herself got all her life. She 
hoped, and it was Landor's error and misfortune in this to 
have neglected her advice, that he would send his sons 
home to England to be educated. His bent towards liter- 
ature Landor had not, indeed, like many men of genius, 
derived fiK)m his mother. She looked upon his exertions 
in this kind with a vague respect not unmingled with 
alarm. In thanking him for a copy of his Latin poetry 
which he had sent her, she had said it was pronounced by 
the learned to be very delightful, " but one cannot read it, 



128 LANDOR. [chap. 

to understand it, oneself." And now, when she heard of 
the Imaginary Conversations, she only hoped he was not 
injuring his health by too much work. " For God's sake 
do not hurt your eyes, nor rack your brains too much, 
to amuse the world by writing; but take care of your 
health, which will be of greater use to your family." 

To his other occupations Landor began to add, soon af- 
ter his arrival at Florence, that of a picture collector. He 
formed his own taste and his own opinions in connoisseur- 
ship as in other things, and acted on them with his usual 
confidence and precipitancy. He anticipated the modern 
predilection for the pre-Raphaelite masters, whose pictures 
were then in no demand. Of the works of these and oth- 
er schools, an almost incredible number, some good, but 
according to skilled evidence the greater part bad or in- 
different, passed through Landor's hands in the course of 
the next fifteen years. He liked the rooms in which he 
lived to be denuded of nearly all furniture except pictures, 
with which their walls were covered from floor to ceiling. 
He was a great giver, and fond, especially in later years, of 
sending away a guest the richer for a token in the shape 
of a picture from his walls. Always disinclined to general 
society, and particularly to official society, he found in. 
Florence as much companionship as he desired of the sort 
that suited him best. Among the residents his chief asso- 
ciates were Mr. Seymour Kirkup, then and for half a cen- 
tury afterwards a central figure of the English colony in 
the city ; Charles Armitage Brown, the friend and com- 
rade of Keats; and a Mr. Leckie, whose company is said 
to have been more joyous than decorous, and more wel- 
come to Landor than to his wife. Francis Hare, too, was 
often in Florence, and when he and Landor were together, 
the encounter of wits ran high. Both were men of amaz- 



v.] LIFE AT FLORENCE. 129 

ing knowledge and amazing memory ; their self-confidence 
was about equal. Landor was in intercourse of this kind 
the more urbane and forbearing of the two, Hare the more 
overpoweringly brilliant and impetuous. They disputed 
often, but never quarrelled, and remained faithful friends 
to the last. Landor's letters to Hare during his absence 
are as full as those to Southey of the varied matter of his 
thoughts, set forth in his energetic, disconnected way, and 
often containing germs which we find developed in the 
Conversations of the time. 

After the appearance of the first two volumes of his 
Conversations Landor was habitually sought out, as a man 
of acknowledged genius and fame, by the more distin- 
guished of the English who came to Florence. He seldom 
accepted dinners or other invitations, but received in his 
own house those visitors who brought him introductions. 
One day Hogg, the friend of Shelley, was announced while 
Hare was sitting in the room. Landor said that he felt 
himself like La Fontaine with all the better company of 
the beasts about him. Hogg was delighted with his inter- 
view, and wrote afterwards that if he wished to procure 
any one for whom he cared a real benefit, it would be the 
friendship of Walter Savage Landor. In 1825 came Leigh 
Hunt. In his short-lived paper, the Liberal, Byron's 
Vision of Judgment with its preface had been published 
three years before, but he had lately made his amende, as 
he tells us, to Landor, with whom he was always thence- 
forward on good terms. 

Soon afterwards came Hazlitt; who brought no intro- 
duction, but said he would beard the lion in his den, " and 
walked up to his house," says Mr. Kirkup, " one winter's 
morning in nankeen shorts and white stockings, was made 
much of by the royal animal, and often returned at night, 



130 LANDOR. [chap. 

for Landor was much out in the day, in all weathers." Of 
their conversations one is recorded in which Hazlitt ex- 
pounded to his breathless and, as it seemed, envious host, 
the simple process by which, under the Scotch law, he had 
been enabled to get himself divorced by consent from his 
wife ; and another in which, on Landor saying that he had 
never seen Wordsworth, Hazlitt asked, " But you have seen 
a horse, I suppose?" and being answered yes, continued, 
" Well, sir, if you have seen a horse, I mean his head, sir, 
you may say you have seen Wordsworth, sir." But the 
visitors with whom Landor formed at this time the closest 
and most permanent friendship were not Hunt or Hazlitt, 
but the Irish nobleman who, with his gifted wife and the 
French Apollo who had lately attached himself to their 
household, was making at this time his memorable Italian 
tour. Lord Blessington had been known long ago to Lan- 
dor as Lord Mountjoy, and when he came to Florence 
made haste to renew their acquaintance. In his wife, the 
fascinating daughter of a ruffianly Irish squireen, married 
at fourteen to a ruffianly English officer, and again, after 
some years of widowhood, to this amiable, cultivated, 
sumptuous, gouty, reformed roue of an Irish peer — in 
Lady Blessington Landor found the most appreciative and 
most constant of friends. Of all the celebrities of her ac- 
quaintance, and that means of all who were living in her 
day, Landor was the one for whom she conceived from the 
first, and retained until her death, the warmest attachment 
and respect. She thought him the most genuinely polite 
man in Europe, and it was a point upon which she had a 
right to speak'. With Lord Blessington and Count D'Or- 
say Landor became almost as fast friends as with my Lady, 
and he spent most of the evenings of one whole summer, 
and two a week of the next, in the enjoyment of their so- 



v.] LIFE AT FLORENCE. 131 

ciety in the beautiful Casa Pelosi, the villa which they 
occupied on the Lung' Arno. In 1827 the Blessingtons 
persuaded him to join them in a yachting trip to Naples ; 
but as on a former trip with Hare to Rome, so again now 
Landor's pleasure was marred by his feverish anxiety on 
account of his children. It was on the former of these 
expeditions that Landor had received the first childish let- 
ter from his son Arnold, and had ended his own answer 
with the words — 

" I shall never be quite happy until I see you again and put my 
cheek upon your head. Tell my sweet Julia that if I see twenty lit- 
tle girls I will not romp with any of them before I romp with her, and 
kiss your two dear brothers for me. You must always love them as 
much as I love you, and you must teach them how to be good boys, 
which I cannot do so well as you can. God preserve and bless you, 
my own Arnold. My heart beats as if it would fly to you, my own 
fierce creature. We shall very soon meet. Love your Babbo." 

In 1827 there came to the Villa Castiglione another vis- 
itor, with whom Landor formed an immediate friendship. 
This was Mr. Ablett of Llanbedr, a Welsh gentleman of 
fortune and literary tastes, who conceived an enthusiasm 
for Landor's genius and his person, commissioned a bust 
of him by Gibson, and a year afterwards, Landor being 
then looking out for a new place of abode, and desiring 
one in the country near Florence, came forward to furnish 
him the means of securing for himself a home that seemed 
the ideal of his dreams. This was the Villa Gherardesca, 
a fine and ancient house, surrounded with a considerable 
extent of farm and garden, on a height a little below 
Fiesole, to the right hand of the road ascending to that 
city from Florence. By the beauty of its prospect and 
the charm of its associations, this site was for Landor the 
choicest that could be found. His favourite of all Italian 



132 LANDOR. [chap. V. 

authors, his favourite, indeed, of all in the world after 
Shakspeare, Milton, and the ancients, was Boccaccio. The 
Valley of Ladies, described in the most enchanting passage 
of the Decameron, lies within the grounds of the Villa 
Gherardesca, and the twin streams of Affrico and Mensola, 
celebrated in the JVinfale, run through them. The price 
of this enviable property so far exceeded any means im- 
mediately at Landor's disposal, that he had never even 
thought of becoming its purchaser. But Mr. Ablett in- 
sisted on advancing the required amount. He would take 
no interest, and Landor was after some years able to repay 
the capital of the loan out of the yearly savings on his 
income. It was in 1829 that he removed with his family 
into their new home. 



CHAPTER VI. 

FIESOLE AND ENGLAND THE EXAMINATION OF SHAKSPEARE 

PERICLES AND ASPASIA THE PENTAMERON. 

[1829—1837.] 

The years spent by Lander in his villa at Fiesole seem, on 
the whole, to have been the happiest in his life. His chil- 
dren were not yet of the age when the joy which children 
give either ceases or is transformed; they were still his 
rapturously loved playmates ; and the farm and gardens 
of the villa made the rarest of playgrounds. Father and 
children alike found endless occupation and pastime in 
delving, planting, clearing, gardening, and the keeping of 
pets. For the first time since he went abroad Landor's love 
of animals had now fall play. Besides the great house-dog 
Parigi, we hear of the cat Cincirillo, and the difficulty of 
keeping him from the birds ; of a tame marten, for whom 
when he died his master composed a feeling epitaph ; a 
tame leveret, and all manner of other pets. The place 
was as beautiful and fertile as it was rich in associations. 
From amid the clouds of olive, and spires of cypress with- 
in his gates, Landor loved to look down to right and left 
along the sweep of Yaldarno, or away towards the distant 
woods of Yallombrosa, or the misty ridges above Arezzo ; 
he loved at sunset to watch all the hills of Tuscany turn- 
ing to amethyst beneath those skies of pearl. 



134 LANDOR. [chap. 



" Let me sit down and muse by thee 
Awhile, aerial Fiesole," 



^^^« I 



he wrote ; and even while he found his new home the 
best, his thoughts went back with affection to that which 
he had left in Wales. 

" Llanthony ! an ungenial clime, 
And the broad wing of restless Time, 
Have rudely swept thy mossy walls 
And rocked thy abbots in their palls. 
I loved thee by thy streams of yore, 
By distant streams I love thee more." 

To his friend Francis Hare, who had married not long 
before, Landor writes : 

"... Did I tell you I have bought a place in the country, near 
Fiesole ? I shall say no more about it to you, but try whether Mrs. 
H. will not bring you to see it in the spring. 

Dear Mrs. Hare, — Do then conduct your slave (of whom I dare 
say you are prouder than ever Zenobia would have been if she had 
taken Aurelian) back again to Florence. — No, not to Florence, but to 
Fiesole. Be it known, I am master of the very place to which the 
greatest genius of Italy, or the Continent, conducted those ladies who 
told such pleasant tales in the warm weather, and the very scene of 
his Ninfale. Poor Affrico, for some misconduct, has been confined 
within stone walls. There no longer is lake or river, but a little ca- 
nal. The place, however, is very delightful, and I have grapes, figs, 
and a nightingale — all at your service — but you cannot be treated 
with all on the same day." 

To his sisters Landor writes with more detail and more 
enthusiasm. He tells the whole story of Mr. Ablett's un- 
expected kindness. " It is true his fortune is very large ; 
but if others equal him in fortune, no human being ever 
equalled him in generosity." Landor goes on to describe 
the house, the size and arrangement of the rooms, the 



VI.] FIESOLE AND ENGLAND. 136 

views, the two gardens (one with a fountain), the conserva- 
tories for lemons and oranges. He tells too of the cy- 
presses, vines, roses, arbutuses, bays, and French fruit-trees 
which he is planting; of the wholesoraeness of the soil and 
climate, " I have the best water, the best air, and the best 
oil in the world. My. country now is Italy, where I have 
a residence for life, and literally may sit under my own 
vine and my own fig-tree. I have some thousands of the 
one and some scores of the other, with myrtles, pomegran- 
ates, gagias, and mimosas in great quantity. I intend to 
make a garden not very unlike yours at Warwick ; but 
alas ! time is wanting. I may live another ten years, but 
do not expect it. In a few days, whenever the weather 
will allow it, I have four mimosas ready to place round 
my tomb, and a friend who is coming to plant them." 
The friend here in question is no other than Landor's old 
love lanthe, who to his delight had reappeared about this 
time in Florence. Her first husband had died within a 
year of Landor's. own ill-starred marriage. She had now 
lately buried her second, and was the object of the ad- 
dresses at the same time of a French duke and an English 
earl ; neither of which were ultimately accepted. The 
course of her own and Landor's lives brought them across 
one another's path once and again before her death. 
Those who saw them in company have described the 
tender and assiduous homage which marked his bearing 
to her above all other women, and his allusions to her in 
prose and verse show that she never ceased to be the ideal 
of his inward thoughts. 

The letter just quoted was written on New Year's Day, 
1830. A few weeks before, Landor had lost his mother. 
That kind, just, and in her own way most shrewd and 
capable old lady, had been failing since the spring of 



136 LANDOR. [chap. 

1829, and bad died in October, at tbe close of ber eigbty- 
fifth year. " My motber's great kindness to me," writes 
Landor, "tbrougbout tbe wbole course of ber life, made 
me perpetually tbink of ber witb tbe tenderest love. I 
am not sorry tbat sbe left me some token of ber regard; 
but sbe gave me too many in ber lifetime for me to tbink 
of taking any now." So Landor asks bis sisters to keep 
tbe little legacies wbicb bis motber bad left bira. What 
is more, be insists on tbeir continuing to bave tbe enjoy- 
ment of Ipsley, and declines to allow tbe place to be let 
or its contents to be sold for bis own benefit. For tbe 
rest, tbe tenour of Landor's life was little changed. His 
thoughts were as much bis companions as ever. He was 
to be met at all seasons rambling alone, in old clothes and 
battered straw bat, upon tbe heights round Fiesole, and 
audibly, like Wordsworth "booing" about the bills of 
Cumberland, repeating to himself the masterpieces tbat 
be loved, or trying and balancing tbe clauses and periods 
of his own stately prose. He was constantly adding to 
and filling out bis Imaginary Conversations. One or two 
pieces which he bad first conceived m this form grew dur- 
ing those Fiesolan days, as we shall see by-and-by, to tbe 
proportions of independent books. But the first book 
which Landor published after he came to Fiesole was one 
not of prose conversations, but of poetry. He bad been 
long urged by Francis Hare to bring out a revised selec- 
tion from bis early poems, which at present only existed 
in volumes so rare tbat it was almost impossible any lon- 
ger to procure tbem. After some years of hesitation tbe 
project was at last carried out, and the result appeared in 
1831, in tbe shape of a volume dedicated to Hare himself, 
and containing reprints of Gebir, of Count Julian, of some 
pieces chosen from the Simonidea and other earlier col- 



VI.] FIESOLE AND ENGLAND. 137 

lections, besides a few things which were now printed for 
the first tirae. From Gebir, as now and afterwards repub- 
lished, Landor cut out all passages implying praise of 
Buonaparte or of revolutionary France. Following Count 
Julian, he printed three dramatic fragments, of which he 
had sent the manuscript to Southey from Pisa ten years 
before ; two on the Spanish subject of Ines de Castro and 
Don Pedro ; one, under the title Ippolito di Este, contain- 
ing some recovered or rewritten fragments of the tragedy 
burnt long ago at Llanthony. Then followed the Iceland- 
ic tale of Gunlang, horn the collection of 1805. Between 
the love-pieces and the elegies selected from the Simoni- 
dea came a number of miscellaneous poems, some old and 
some new. Landor showed that his wrath against his 
Welsh persecutors had not even yet subsided by printing 
a long and laboured set of Hudibrastics, written at the 
time against the adverse counsel Taunton. Much better to 
read, perhaps indeed the best of all Landor's short poems 
in the quality of deliberate, delicate, meditative descrip- 
tion, is the Fcesulan Idyl, from which we have already 
quoted the admirable lines relating to the love of flowers. 
All naturally was not idyllic, nor all peaceable, in Lan- 
dor's new life. Having been robbed of some plate at the 
tirae when he was taking possession of his villa, he applied 
to the police, assuring them at the same time of his pro- 
found conviction of their corruptness and incompetence. 
Thereupon, apparently to his surprise, their feelings rose, 
and the quarrel very soon reached such a pitch that Laur 
dor was ordered to leave Tuscany, and did actually retreat 
as far as Lucca. Plence he wrote a fine courteous letter 
to the Grand Duke in person, who took the whole matter 
pleasantly ; and Lord Normanby, Sir Robert Lawley, and 
other friends interceding, the order of expulsion was tacitr 
K 7 



138 LANDOR. [chap. 

ly regarded as a dead letter, and Landor came back in tri- 
umph. Very soon afterwards he was deep in a quarrel 
with a French neighbour of his own at Fiesole, a M. x\n- 
toir, living on a property of which the tenant had a cus- 
tomary right to the surplus water from the fountain of 
the Villa Gherardesca. The watering of Landor's flowers 
and shrubberies, and the English prodigality of the family 
in the matter of bathing, and the washing of stables, ken- 
nels, and cages, reduced this surplus to practically nothing. 
Hence a grievance, of course passionately resented. A 
duel between the disputants having been averted by the 
wisdom of Mr. Kirkup, whom Landor had chosen to be 
his second, there ensued a litigation which lasted for 
years ; the case being tried and retried in all the courts of 
Tuscany.* 

But these combative and explosive aspects of Landor's 
nature were much more rarely revealed in ordinary social 
intercourse than of old. The impression which he made 
during these years upon his favoured guests and visitors 
was one of noble geniality as well as of imposing force. 
A new, close, and joyous friendship formed by him in 
these days, and never dropped afterwards, was with Mr. 
Kenyon, the friend also of the Hares and of many of the 
most distinguished men of the next succeeding generation. 
He had during a part of his life at Fiesole a pleasant 
neighbour in the novelist G. P. R. James, to whom he af- 
terwards made allusion as " my hearty Tory friend, Mr. 
James, whose Mary of Burgundy Scott himself (were he 
envious) might have envied." That zealous and open- 
minded cultivator of men of genius, Crabbe Robinson, al- 

^ The pleas brought forward on Landor's side, before the court of 
final appeal, constitute a stout quarto pamphlet, in a hundred and 
twelve numbered paragraphs, dated 1841, 



VI.] FIESOLE AND ENGLAND. 139 

ready familiar with Southey and Wordsworth, came to 
Florence in the summer of 1830, and presented himself 
immediately at the Villa Gherardesca. " To Landor's so- 
ciety," writes Robinson, " I owed much of my highest en- 
joyment during my stay at Florence. He was a man of 
florid complexion, with large, full eyes, altogether a ' leo- 
nine ' man, and with a fierceness of tone well suited to his 
name ; his decisions being confident, and on all subjects, 
whether of taste or life, unqualified ; each standing for it- 
self, not caring whether it was in harmony with what had 
gone before or would follow from the same oracular lips. 
He was conscious of his own infirmity of temper, and told 
me he saw few persons, because he could not bear contra- 
diction. Certamly, I frequently did contradict him ; yet 
his attentions to me, both this and the following year, 
were unwearied." He tells elsewhere how Landor used 
to invite him to his villa constantly of evenings, and send 
him back always at night under escort of the dog Parigi, 
who understood his duty perfectly, and would attend the 
visitor as far as the city gates, and duly return by himself 
to the villa. Robinson's account is further valuable as mak- 
ing us realize the mingled respect, amusement, and aston- 
ishment with which Landor was regarded by his Italian 
neighbours and workpeople. ^^Tutti gVInglesi sono pazzi, 
ma questo poif'' — such, according to another witness, was 
the sentence in which their impressions were summed up. 
His passionate dealings with his fellow-creatures, and his 
tenderness for the inanimate things of nature, were in like 
manner typified in the local legend which represented him 
as having once thrown his cook out of window, and in- 
stantly afterwards thrust out his head with the exclama- 
tion, " Good God, I forgot the violets !" 

In the early summer of 1832, at the urgent request of 



140 LANDOR. [chap. 

Mr. Ablett and of other friends, Landor left Fiesole on a 
visit to England. It was the first time he had been in his 
native country for eighteen years. His stay seems to 
have given almost unmixed pleasure both to himself and 
to those with whom he was brought in contact. He 
found his friend Madame de Molande at Brighton, "in 
the midst of music, dancing, and fashionable people turn- 
ed radicals. This amused me highly." The excitement 
concerning the passing of the reform bill was at that 
moment at its height: "The people are half mad about 
the king and the Tories." On a flying passage through 
J^ondon Landor was hospitably entertained by the friend- 
ly Robinson, who took him to see Flaxman one day, 
Charles Lamb another, and Coleridge a third. In his 
praise of Flaxman, the one living Englishman who shared, 
although not his scholarship, his natural affinity with the 
genius of Greece, Landor seemed to his companion wildly 
enthusiastic. With Lamb, whose life was then drawing 
to its close, and with his sister, Landor was no less delight- 
ed. Not so with Coleridge, although that philosopher put 
on a new suit of clothes in his honour, and made him as 
many pretty speeches as if he had been a young girl ; but 
his talk was all about himself, and he displeased Landor 
by taking no notice of an enthusiastic mention of Southey. 
He next went to make at last the personal acquaintance 
of Julius Hare at Cambridge. It must have been at this 
time that Hare persuaded Landor to become a contributor 
to the Philological Museum^ a periodical lately founded 
by* himself and some other Cambridge scholars. In it 
Landor published in this year a selection of pieces in Latin 
verse, including that charming address to his eldest son, 
of which mention has already been made above (p. 10). 
Next year followed in the same journal one of the stateliest 



Vi.] FIESOLE AND ENGLAND. 141 

and most diversified of Landor's classical dialogues, in 
which. Scipio is found conversing with Pansetius and 
Polybius beside the ruins of Carthage. The strength of 
Rome and the culture of G-reece are celebrated with equal 
eloquence, and a tale, such as Landor loved, of perilously 
delightful converse between an elderly philosopher and a 
beautiful girl, is told in his peculiar vein of clear and cap- 
tivating Greek grace, of ever appropriate but never fore- 
seen or familiar imagery. Landor never long remembered 
any of his own writings after he had finished them, and 
it is to be regretted that he has weakened the originali- 
ty of this admirable conversation by unconsciously intro- 
ducing into it echoes and repetitions both from that of 
Epicurus and that of the two Ciceros. 

From Cambridge Landor went to see his sisters at War- 
wick, and thence to stay with his benefactor Ablett, at his 
beautiful home of Llanbedr. The two friends went on 
together to pay flying visits to Southey and Wordsworth 
at the lakes. Upon Southey the renewal of personal con- 
verse with Landor left an impression altogether delightful ; 
but in the intercourse of Landor with Wordsworth the 
seeds seem already to have been sown of that change of 
feeling on Landor's part which we shall have to notice by- 
and-by. For the present, however, their correspondence 
with and language concerning one another continued to 
be as cordial as ever. Towards the end of September 
Landor was back again in London. Immediately after- 
wards he set out on his way home, accompanied by Julius 
Hare and another companion from Cambridge. This was 
Mr. Worsley, the present master of Downing. The three 
travelled by Belgium and the field of Waterloo, " an ugly 
table for an ugly game," as Landor calls it, and then up 
the Khine. At Bonn Landor met W. Schlegel, and the 



U2 



LANDOR. 



[chap. 



aged poet and patriot Arndt. Of Schlegel he writes to 
Crabbe Robinson, " He resembles a little pot-bellied pony 
tricked out with stars, buckles, and ribbons, looking askance, 
from his ring and halter in the market, for an apple from 
one, a morsel of bread from another, a % of ginger from 
a third, and a pat from everybody." His interview with 
the honest Arndt the next day had, however, " settled the 
bile this coxcomb of the bazaar had excited." In one of 
the very last pieces of verse Landor ever wrote I find 
him recalling with pleasure how he and Arndt had talked 
together in Latin thirty' years before in the poet's orchard ; 
how they had chanced to hear a song of Arndt's own sung 
by the people in the town below ; and how nimbly the 
old poet had run and picked up an apple to give his guest, 
who had kept the pips and planted them in his garden at 
Fiesole. At Innsbriick Landor busied himself with seek- 
ing for memorials of the Tyrolese patriot Hofer, who had 
always been one of his favourite heroes. Travelling by 
the Tyrol to Venice, he sent home from that city for pub- 
lication an account of what he had learnt, together with 
incidental observations on Waterloo and Napoleon, on lib- 
erty and Venice, which is one of his most striking pieces 
of high plain prose, at once impassioned and austere. By 
the beginning of 1833 Landor was back again among his 
children, his pet animals, and his pictures at Fiesole. He 
composed in memory of his visit to England three several 
odes ; one to Ablett, in which he coupled Southey and 
Wordsworth together in the lines, 

" Live Derwent'e guest ! and thou by Grasmere springs ! 
Serene creators of immortal things ;"^ 



The original version of this Ode to Ablett was published in Leigh 



tL] FIESOLE AND ENGLAND. 143 

and the other two addressed respectively to Southey avd 
Wordsworth themselves. These odes contain as high- 
pitched lyrical writing as Landor ever attempted. Each 
of them has its fine lines and its felicities, but none of 
them is felicitous or excellent all through. Landor is 
in this kind of writing singularly unequal, starting often 
with a fine thought and a noble musical movement, and 
flagging and halting within a few lines. The ode to 
Wordsworth begins with a well-turned confession of Lan- 
dor's own comparative amateurship in the art of poetry ; 
its central portion is somewhat obscure ; afterwards it falls 
into the lighter critical or colloquial vein of verse in which. 
Landor was generally happy, and ends with one of the 
neatest and at the same time noblest of compliments : 

" We both have run o'er half the space 
Listed for mortals' earthly race ; 
We both have crost life's fervid line, 
And other stars before us shine : 
May they be bright and prosperous 
As those that have been stars for us ! 
Our course by Milton's light was sped, 
And Shakspeare shining overhead : 
Chatting on deck was Dryden too, 
The Bacon of the rhyming crew ; 

Hunt's London Journal, December 3, 1834. The lines quoted in the 
text were preceded by others alluding to the death of Coleridge — ■ 

" Coleridge hath loost his shoe, or bathes in bliss 
Among the spirits that have power like his." 

In a revised version, sent a week or two later to Southey, these lines 
are changed to 

"Coleridge hath heard the call, and bathes in bliss 
Among the spirits that have powers like his." 

Several alterations were made afterwards, and as the ode was next 
printed in 1837, the allusion to Coleridge had disappeared altogether. 



144 LAis^DOR. '^^^ [chap. 

None ever crost our mystic sea 

More richly stored with thought than he ; 

Tho' never tender nor sublime, 

He wrestles with and conquers Time. 

To learn my lore on Chaucer's knee 

Ileft much prouder company; 

Thee gentle Spenser fondly led, 

But me he mostly sent to bed. 

*' I wish them every joy above 
That highly blessed spirits prove, 
Save one : and that too shall be theirs, 
But after many rolling years, 
When 'mid their light thy light appears." 

A far more faultless and more distinguished example of 
Landor's verse, and one not less characteristic than those 
last quoted of his warm and generous appreciation of the 
works and characters of his brother writers, is the elegiac 
address to Marv Lamb on the death of her brother, which 
he wrote immediately upon hearing the news of that 
death in 1834; 

"Comfort thee, thou mourner, yet awhile ! 
Again shall Elia's smile 
Refresh thy heart, where heart can ache no more. 
What is it we deplore ? 

" He leaves behind him, freed from griefs and years 
Far worthier things than tears. 
The love of friends without a single foe : 
Unequalled lot below ! 



" His gentle soul, his genius, these are thine ; 
For these dost thou repine ? 
He may have left the lowly walks of men ; 
Lef ^ them he has ; what then ? 



Ti.] FIESOLE AND ENGLAND. 145 

" Are not his footsteps followed by the eyes 
Of all the good and wise ? 
Tho' the warm day is over, yet they seek 
Upon the lofty peak 

" Of his pure mind the roseate light that glows 
O'er death's perennial snows. 
Behold him ! from the region of the blest 
He speaks : he bids thee rest." 

Many months before tMs he had been much affected in 
thinking over the deaths and misfortunes of distinguished 
men which had been happening round about him in quick 
succession. " What a dismal gap," he writes to Robinson, 
" has been made within a little time in the forest of intel- 
lect, among the plants of highest growth !" Then, after 
enumerating the deaths of Byron, Scott, Goethe, and Cole- 
ridge, he alludes to Southey's misfortune in his wife's de- 
cay of mind, and ends, " It appears as if the world were 
cracking all about me, and leaving me no object on which 
to fix my eyes." 

Nevertheless new friends of a younger generation were 
drawing one after another to Landor's side. In the year 
after his visit to England there came from Cambridge the 
scholar and poet to whom the lovers of Landor are indebt- 
ed for the most living and skilful sketch which they pos- 
sess of his career as a whole. I mean Lord Houghton, 
then Mr. Monckton Milnes and a recent pupil of Julius 
Hare, from whom he brought to Landor a letter of intro- 
duction. Being laid up with Florentine fever, Mr. Milnes 
was taken by Landor to Fiesole to recruit, and passed sev- 
eral weeks in his villa. He has written of Landor's affec- 
tionate reception, of his complimentary old-world manners, 
and of his elegant though simple hospitality ; of his con- 
versation, so affluent, animated, and coloured, so rich in 



146 



landor. 



[cHAt. 



knowledge and illustration, so gay and yet so weighty, that 
it equalled, if not surpassed, all that has been related of 
the table-talk of men eminent for social speech ; and last, 
not least, of his laughter, " so pantomimic, yet so genial, 
rising out of a momentary silence into peals so cumulative 
and sonorous, that all contradiction and possible affront 
was merged for ever." 

Yet another pilgrim of these days was Emerson. Lan- 
dor was one of the five distinguished men for the sake of 
seeing whom he had made his first pilgrimage to Europe. 
Through a common friend, the sculptor Green ough, Emer- 
son received an invitation to dine at the Villa Gherardesca, 
and in his English Traits, published many years after- 
wards, had much to say concerning his host. " I found 
him noble and courteous, living in a cloud of pictures at 
his Villa Gherardesca, a fine house commanding a beautiful 
landscape. I had inferred from his books, or magnified 
from some anecdotes, an impression of Achillean wrath — 
an untameable petulance. I do not know whether the im- 
putation were just or not, but certainly on this May day 
his courtesy veiled that haughty mind, and he was the 
most patient and gentle of hosts." Then follows a report 
of conversations held and opinions expressed at the villa, 
to some part of which, as we shall see, Landor felt called 
upon to take exception when it appeared,. Another Amer- 
ican guest, made not less welcome at the time, though he 
afterwards gave Landor occasion to repent his hospitality, 
was that most assiduous of flattei-ers and least delicate of 
gossips, N. P. Willis. With him Landor discussed the proj- 
ect of an American edition of the Imaginary Conversa- 
tions, and the discussion reached so practical a point that 
Landor actually entrusted to him his own copy of the five 
volumes already published, interleaved and full of correc- 



vt.] EXAMINATIOK OP SHAKSPEaM. UV 

tions and additions, as well as his manuscript materials for 
a sixth. These Mr. Willis forthwith consigned to America, 
and having himself proceeded to England, lingered on in 
obsequious enjoyment of the great company among whom 
he found himself invited, and ceased to trouble himself any 
further about the business; nor was it until after much 
delay and annoyance that his neglected charge could be 
recovered from over seas. He had been more loyal in de- 
livering to the hands to which it was addressed another 
volume in manuscript confided to him by Landor, that of 
the Citation and Examination of William ShaJcspeare. Of 
this Lady Blessington undertook, at Landor's request, to 
superintend the publication, and it appeared anonymously 
in the course of the year 1834. 

The Examination of Shakspeare is the first of that tril- 
ogy of books, as it has been sometimes called, the compo- 
sition of which occupied the chief part of Landor's strength 
during his life at Fiesole. Some years before, he had writ- 
ten to Southey that he was trembling at his own audacity 
in venturing to bring Shakspeare upon the scene. At that 
time he merely meditated a dialogue of the ordinary com- 
pass, but the dialogue had grown into a volume. What 
attracted Landor especially towards the episode of Shak- 
speare's trial at Charlecote for deer-stealing was his own 
familiarity with the scenery and associations of the place. 
In an earlier dialogue of Chaucer, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, 
he had represented Chaucer as telling a story (and an un- 
commonly dreary story too) concerning an imaginary an- 
cestor of Sir Thomas Lucy. He now introduced that wor- 
thy magistrate himself, sitting in judgment in the hall of 
his house upon the youthful culprit from the neighbour- 
ing town. The account of the examination is supposed to 
be written by the magistrate's clerk, one Ephraim Barnett, 



148 LANDOR. [cflA?. 

a kindly soul, who allows liis own Coirlpassion for the pris- 
oner to appear plainly enough in the course of his narra- 
tive. The accusers are two of Sir Thomas's keepers, and 
the accused finds a malicious enemy in the person of the 
family chaplain, Master Silas Gough, who is conceived as 
having views of his own in reference to Anne Hathaway. 
The knight himself is made to show gleams of sense and 
kindness through his grotesque family and personal vanity. 
He has pretensions, moreover, to the character of an ora- 
cle on matters poetical. After many courteous rejoinders 
and covert banterings addressed by the prisoner to the 
knight, and many discomfitures of Master Silas, with much 
discussion and quotation of poetry, and an energetic work- 
ing out of the intrinsic irony of the situation, the scene is 
brought to a close by the sudden escape of the prisoner, 
who darts out of the hall before any one can lay hands 
upon him, and in a trice is seen galloping past reach of 
pursuit upon his father's sorrel mare. 

This is the longest and most sustained attempt ever 
made by Landor at witty or humorous writing. One of 
the greatest of humorists, Charles Lamb, is reported to 
have said of the book, which appeared a few weeks before 
his death, that only two men could have written it, namely, 
the man who did write it, or he on whom it was written. 
This friendly formula was probably uttered with little 
meaning ; but by Mr. Forster it has been taken in all seri- 
ousness. One of the earliest literary efforts of that zeal- 
ous biographer himself was an enthusiastic review of the 
Examination of Shakspeare when it appeared ; and in 
writing Landor's life five-and-thirty years later he showed 
himself as enthusiastic as ever. Mrs. Browning has ex- 
pressed a similar opinion, but I think it is one few stu- 
dents are likely to share. Landor's natural style is almost 



VI.] EXAMINATION OF SHAKSPEARE. 149 

too weighty ; his imitation of the seventeenth-century dic- 
tion in this scene renders it even cumbrous. The imita- 
tive character of the prose is moreover quite out of keep- 
ing with the purely Landorian style of the verses with 
which the dialogue is interspersed. " Is there a man wise 
enough," wrote Landor once, "to know whether he himself 
is witty or not, to the extent he aims at ? I doubt whether 
any question needs more self-examination. It is only the 
fool's heart that is at rest upon it." That Landor's own 
heart was not fully at rest on the question he shows by 
saying of the Examination, when he sent it off, " It is full 
of fun, I know not whether of wit." It is evident that 
Landor's ample, exaggerative, broadly ironical vein of fun 
needed, in order to commend it to others, the help of his 
own genial presence and exulting, irresistible laugh. As 
conveyed by his strong-backed, stately-paced written sen- 
tences, its effect is to oppress rather than to exhilarate ; 
such at least is the feeling of the present writer. Witty, 
in a towering, substantial, solidly ingenious way, Landor 
unquestionably is ; but tellingly or adroitly so he is not ; 
the trick of lightness, grotesqueness, of airy or grim ban- 
ter, of rapidity and flash, is not within the compass of 
his powers. 

Cumbrous as may be its pace, loaded its wit, the Ex- 
amination is nevertheless rich in original thought and in- 
vention, and in wise and tender sayings ; and some of the 
verses scattered through it, particularly the piece called the 
Maid''s Lament, are excellent. But, on the whole, it seems 
to me the nearest approach to an elaborate failure made 
by Landor in this form of writing. The personage of 
Shakspeare himself is certainly less successful than that of 
Sir Thomas Lucy. A single brief quotation may serve to 
show how energetically the author contrives to push his 



150 LANDOR. 



[chap. m\ 



own vein of irony, and at the same time of poetry, into 
the utterances of the didactic knight. Waiving a prom- 
ised lecture to the prisoner on the meaning of the words 
"natural cause," Sir Thomas Lucy goes on : 

"Thy mind being unprepared for higher cogitations, and the 
groundwork and religious duty not being well rammer-beaten and 
flinted, I do pass over this supererogatory point, and inform thee 
rather that bucks and swans and herons have something in their 
very names announcing them of knightly appurtenance. And (God 
forfend that evil do ensue therefrom !) that a goose on the common, 
or a game-cock on the loft of cottager or villager, may be seized, 
bagged, and abducted, with far less otfence to the laws. In a buck 
there is something so gainly and so grand, he treadeth the earth with 
such ease and such agility, he abstaineth from all other animals with 
such punctilious avoidance, one would imagine God created him when 
He created knighthood. In the swan there is such purity, such cold- 
ness is there in the element he inhabiteth, such solitude of station, 
that verily he doth remind me of the Virgin Queen herself. Of the 
heron I have less to say, not having him about me; but I never 
heard his lordly croak without the conceit that it resembled a chan- 
cellor's or a primate's." 

Following the Examination of Shakspeare in the same 
volume, and in a far happier vein, was a conversation, also 
feigned to have been preserved by the same scribe, Ephra- 
im Barnett, between Essex and Spenser after the burning 
of the poet's house and of his children in Ireland. This 
is, indeed, one of the noblest of all Landor's dialogues of 
passion. Caring little for Spenser's poetry, he had always 
been interested in his View of the State of Affairs in Ire- 
land ; and Ireland in the wild days of the tithe rebellion, 
which was at its height when Landor wrote, was in the 
foreground of all men's thoughts. The beginning of the 
dialogue is political ; Essex, who has just been charged 
with the settlement of the kingdom, questions Spense? 



VI.] PERICLES AND ASPASIA. 151 

without at first noticing his anguish and perturbation. 
Then follows the famous passage in which the revelation 
of the poet's misfortunes is at length forced from him. The 
noble courtesy of Essex, and the tenderness and imaginative 
beauty of the attempts made by him to console his friend 
before he knows the full nature of the misfortune, are set 
in his finest contrast with the crushed despair of Spenser, 
his shrinking from the intolerable memories within him, 
and the spasm almost of madness with which those mem- 
ories at last burst from his lips, yet without ever tear- 
ing or forcing the strong fabric of the language in which 
they are conveyed. This is the dialogue to which per- 
haps first of all the reader should turn who wishes to form 
an idea of Landor's peculiar dramatic power and dramatic 
method. 

The second book planned, and in great part written, by 
Landor at Fiesole was on a Greek theme — Pericles and 
Aspasia — and filled two volumes. It is characteristic of 
the author that he chose for the treatment of this subject 
a form which no one else would have thought of, namely, 
the epistolary. He originally intended to introduce con- 
versations as well, but in the end decided not to do so, and 
the* book as it stands consists entirely of imaginary letters 
from Pericles to Aspasia, from Aspasia to Pericles, and 
from a few minor personages to each of them. The chief 
of these subordinate correspondents is Cleone, a friend 
and former companion of Aspasia at Miletus. Cleone is 
in love with a youth, Xeniades, who himself hopelessly 
loves Aspasia, and, following her to Athens, dies there. 
Famous personages of Greek history, as Anaxagoras and 
Alcibiades, take part also in the correspondence. It i§ 
made to begin with the arrival of Aspasia in x\thens, and 
her first meeting with Pericles, which is represented as 



152 



LANDOK. 



[chap. 



taking place at a performance of the Prometheus Bound 
of ^Eschylus, and it ends with the death of Pericles during 
the plague of Athens and the occupation of the Athenian 
territory by the Spartans. Landor, as he used to say, 
loved walking upon the heights; he loved to think him- 
self into fellow-citizenship with the greatest figures of the 
greatest ages of history; and he created for himself in 
Pericles and Aspasia an opportunity for pouring out all 
that he had imagined or reflected concerning the golden 
age of Greece. His sense of the glories of that age can 
best be realized by reading the language which he himself 
puts into the mouth of Pericles. Conscious of his ap- 
proaching end, Pericles writes a farewell letter to Aspasia, 
whom he has sent into the country out of reach of con- 
tagion : 

" It is right and orderly (he begins) that he who has partaken 
so largely in the prosperity of the Athenians, should close the proces- 
sion of their calamities. The fever that has depopulated our city 
returned upon me last night, and Hippocrates and Acron tell me 
that my end is near. 

" When we agreed, Aspasia, in the beginning of our loves, to 
communicate our thoughts by writing, even while we were both in 
Athens, and when we had many reasons for it, we little foresaw the 
more powerful one that has rendered it necessary of late. We never 
can meet again. The laws forbid it, and love itself enforces them. 
Let wisdom be heard by you as hnperturbably, and affection as au- 
thoritatively, as ever ; and remember that the sorrow of Pericles can 
arise but from the bosom of Aspasia. There is only one word of 
tendei-ness we could say, which we have not said oftentimes before, 
and there is no consolation in it. The happy never say, and never 
hear said, farewell." - 

Then, in a strain at once of composed resignation and ex- 
ulting retrospect, and in language beneath the austere sim- 
plicity of which there throbs the pulse of a passionate 



VI.] PERICLES AND ASP ASIA. 153 

emotion, he proceeds to recount the glorious memories of 
his life : 

" And now (he concludes) at the close of my day, when every light 
is dim, and every guest departed, let me own that these wane before 
me, remembering, as I do, in the pride and fulness of my heart, that 
'Athens confided her glory, and Aspasia her happiness, to me. 

" Have I been a faithful guardian ? Do I resign them to the cus- 
tody of the gods undiminished and unimpaired ? Welcome, then, 
welcome, my last hour ! After enjoying for so great a number of 
years, in my public and private life, what I believe has never been 
the lot of any other, I now extend my hand to the urn, and take with- 
out reluctance or hesitation what is the lot of all." 

The technical scholar, it is true, will find in Pericles and 
Aspasia improbabilities and anachronisms enough ; for 
Landor wrote as usual out of his head, and without re- 
newing his acquaintance with authorities for his special 
purpose ; and his knowledge, astonishing from any other 
point of view, was from that of technical scholarship in- 
complete. He did not trouble himself about considera- 
tions of this kind, observing rightly enough that Dialogue 
was not History, and that in a work of imagination some 
liberties might legitimately be taken with fact. Only, 
then, he should have been careful not to quit that sphere 
of thought and feeling where imagination is lawfully par- 
amount ; not to lay aside, as he too often does, the tone 
of the literary artist for that of the critical and historical 
inquirer, Pericles and Aspasia, like some of the classical 
Conversations, has the misfortune of being weighted with 
disquisitions too learned for the general reader, and not 
sound enough for the special student. But for this draw- 
back, the book is throughout in Landor's best manner. 
It is full of variety and invention ; we pass from the per- 
formance of Prometheus before the assembled Athenians 
L 



154 LANDOR. [chap. 

to Aspasia's account of the dawn of love between herself 
and Pericles, and of the fascination and forwardness of 
the boy Alcibiades, to letters which reveal the love-frenzy 
of the unhappy Xeniades ; then to others containing crit- 
icisms, accompanied by imaginary specimens, of various 
greater or minor Greek poets ; and thence to original ex- 
ercises in poetry by the correspondents themselves. One 
of these, the fragment attempted, we are asked to believe, 
by Aspasia, on the re-union of Agamemnon and Iphigenia 
among the shades, Landor always accounted his best piece 
of dramatic writing in verse. In later editions there are 
added in this place other scenes exhibiting the vengeance 
of Orestes, and illustrating the proud and well-founded con- 
fidence of originality with which Landor was accustomed 
to approach anew themes already handled, even by the 
greatest of masters. Besides all this, we have speeches of 
Pericles on the death of Cimon, the war of Samos, the de- 
fection of Megara and of Euboea, and the policy of Athens 
against Sparta ; speeches brief, compressed, stately, uniting 
with a careful avoidance of the examples to be found in 
Thucydides a still more careful observance of the precept, 
"There is so very much not to say." We have the scene 
in which Aspasia is accused before the assembly, and Per- 
icles defends her. Towards the close of the correspond- 
ence we find reflected in it the shadows of war, pestilence, 
and calamity. Finally, after the death of Pericles, there 
are added two letters in which Alcibiades tells Aspasia 
how he died, and how Cleone, arriving at the house of 
mourning from Miletns, was seized by infection on the 
threshold, and staggering towards the garden where Xeni- 
ades lay buried, died clasping the tomb of him she had 
loved in vain. 

In all this the strength, conciseness, and harmony of 



VI.] PERICLES AND ASPASIA. 155 

Lander's English style are at their height. The verses in 
the book are again very unequal ; its prose is exemplary 
and delightful. The properly dramatic parts, the ebb and 
flow of feeling between Pericles and Aspasia, and between 
Cleone and Xeniades, are often touched with Landor's ut- 
most, that is, as we have said, with an all but Shakspea- 
rian subtlety and justice of insight. The reflective parts 
are full of sayings as new as they are wise, often illus- 
trated and enforced with images of singular beauty. The 
spirit of beauty, indeed, reigns, as it reigns in hardly any 
other modern writing, over the thoughts and language of 
the characters, and the two volumes are perhaps the rich- 
est mine which English prose literature contains of noble 
and unused quotations. 

As if the body of his book were not full enough, Lan- 
dor must needs append to it two close-packed epilogues 
written in his own name. One was political, nominally 
on the Athenian government, but really full of his ideas 
on modern and especially English politics, on the dises- 
tablishment of the Irish Church, the reform of the House 
of Lords, and of the episcopacy ; the other literary, con- 
taining many of those arguments on language and orthog- 
raphy, intended for insertion in the Conversatioiis^ of which 
Landor's original draft had for the present disappeared 
through the carelessness of Mr. N. P. Willis. That gen- 
tleman had in the meantime not a little scandalized his 
acquaintances in England by the book in which he had 
narrated his experiences. To this publication, and to his 
own loss, Landor alludes as follows : " I never look for 
anything, but I should add disappointment and some de- 
gree of inquietude to the loss, I regret the appearance 
of his book more than the disappearance of mine. . . . 
Greatly as I have been flattered by the visits of American 



iAP. ■! 



156 LANDOR. [chap. 

gentlemen, I hope that for the future no penciller of sim- 
ilar compositions will deviate in my favour to the right 
hand of the road from Florence to Fiesole. In case of 
mistake, there is a charming view of the two cities, and of 
Yaldarno and Vallombrosa, from the iron gate at the en- 
trance of my grounds : I could not point out a more ad- 
vantageous position." 

Landor had by this time learnt not to imperil his equa- 
nimity by personal dealings with publishers. Mr. G. P. R. 
James undertook the arrangements for Pericles and Aspa- 
sia, as Lady Blessington had undertaken those for the £!x- 
amination of Shalcspeare. The book was received with 
delight by a distinguished few, but ignored by the general 
public. The publisher lost money by it, and Landor, with- 
out a word of complaint, insisted on making good the loss. 
He, in like manner, paid instead of receiving money for 
the publication of his next book, the Pentameron and 
Pentalogia. The Pentameron is a series of dialogues, con- 
nected by a slender thread of narrative, and supposed to 
have been held on five successive days between Petrarch 
and Boccaccio, in Boccaccio's villa of Certaldo, during his 
recovery from an illness and not long before his death. 
The Pentalogia, which follows, is a series of five miscel- 
laneous dramatic scenes entirely independent of the Pen- 
tameron, and conceived in just the same vein as the 
shorter dramatic imaginary conversations, only written in 
blank verse instead of prose. Two of these are from the 
story of Orestes, and are incorporated in the later editions 
of Pericles and Aspasia ; the others are between Essex 
and Bacon ; the Parents of Luther ; and William Rufus 
and Tyrrell ; the latter a piece of great vigour and spirit. 

In the Pentameron Landor is again at his very best. 
All his study of the great Italian writers of the fourteenth 



vr.] THE PENTAMERON. 157 

century, and all his recent observations of Tuscan scenery 
and Tuscan character, are turned to skilful and harmo^ 
iiious account. Landor loved and understood Boccaccio 
through and through ; and if he over-estimated that pro- 
lific and amiable genius in comparison with other and 
greater men, it was an error which for the present purpose 
was almost an advantage. Nothing can be pleasanter 
than the intercourse of the two friendly poets as Landor 
had imagined it ; nothing more classically idyllic than the 
incidental episodes. Even the humour of the piece is suc- 
cessful, in all at least that has to do with the characters 
of the sly parish priest, the pretty and shrewd servant 
maid Assuntina, and her bashful lover. True, there occur 
one or two heavy stories, heavily and ineffectively told. 
And many lovers of Dante may be shocked at the unsym- 
pathetic criticism of that poet which fills a large part of 
each day's conversation. This is in part consonant with 
the opinions ascribed traditionally to Petrarch, and in part 
represents Landor's private judgment. He held Dante to 
be one of the very greatest of all poets, but thought he 
showed his true greatness only at rare intervals. Recog- 
nizing in poetry, as in history, the part due to the indi- 
vidual alone, Landor. holds Dante personally responsible 
for all those qualities which were imprinted on him by 
his element and his age. Instead of perceiving in him, 
as Carlyle taught the next generation of students to per- 
ceive, the "voice" of all the Catholic centuries, the in- 
carnation of the spirit of the Middle Age and of Florence, 
Landor acknowledged in him only a man of extraordinary 
genius, who had indulged in the Inferno in a great deal 
of vindictive ferocity, and in the Paradiso of barren the- 
ological mysticism. Having no sympathy for the Gothic 
in literature, that is to say, for the fantastic, the unreason- 



158 LANDOR. [chap. 

able, and the grim, Landor collects for superfluous and 
somewhat tedious reprobation examples of these quali- 
ties from Dante. He asserts an extravagant dispropor- 
tion between the good and the bad parts of his work, and 
fails to do justice even to that unmatched power which 
Dante exhibits in every page, and which Landor himself 
shared with him in a remarkable degree, of striking out a 
visible image in words sudden, massive, and decisive. But 
all this and more may be forgiven Landor for the sake of 
such criticism as he devotes to those parts of Dante which 
he does admire. On the episode of Piero and Francesca 
he has put into the mouth of Boccaccio the following 
comments : 

'■'■ Petrarca. The thirty lines from Ed io senti are unequalled by 
any other continuous thirty in the whole dominions of poetry. 

Boccaccio. Give me rather the six on Francesca: for if in the 
former I find the simple, vigorous, clear narration, I find also what I 
would not wish, the features of Ugolino reflected full in Dante. The 
two characters are similar in themselves ; hard, cruel, inflexible, 
malignant, but, whenever moved, moved powerfully. In Francesca, 
with the faculty of divine spirits, he leaves his own nature (not, in- 
deed, the exact representative of theirs), and converts all his strength 
into tenderness. The great poet, like the original man of the Plato- 
nists, is double, possessing the further advantage of being able to 
drop one half at his option, and to resume it. Some of the tender- 
est on paper have no sympathies beyond ; and some of the austerest 
in their intercourse with their fellow -creatures, have deluged the 
world with tears. It is not from the rose that the bee gathers 
honey, but often from the most acrid and most bitter leaves and 
petals. 

* Quaudo leggemmo il disiato riso 

Esser baciato di cotanto aniaute, 
Questi, che mai da me uon fia diviso ! 

La bocca mi bacio tiitto treraante . . . 
Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse . . . 
Quel giorno piu uoii vi leggemmo avante.' 



VI.] THE PENTAMEROK 159 

In the midst of her punishment, Francesca, when she comes to the 
tenderest part of her story, tells it with complacency and delight ; 
and, instead of naming Paolo, which indeed she never has done from 
the beginning, she now designates him as 

' Questi, che mai da me non fia diviso !' 

Are we not impelled to join in her prayer, wishing them happier in 
their union ? 

Petrarca. If there be no sin in it. 

Boccaccio. Ay, and even if there be . . . God help us ! What a 
sweet aspiration in each cesura of the verse ! three love-sighs fixt 
and incorporate ! Then, when she hath said 

'La bocca mi bacio tutto tremante,' 

she stops : she would avert the eyes of Dante from her : he looks 
for the sequel : she thinks he looks severely: she says, ^Galeotto 
is the name of the book,' fancying by this timorous little flight she 
has drawn him far enough from the nest of her young loves. No, the 
eagle beak of Dante and his piercing eyes are yet over her. ^Gale- 
otto is the name of the book.' ' What matters that ?' ' And of the 
writer.' ' Or that either ?' At last she disarms him ; but how ? 
^That day we read no more.' Such a depth of intuitive judgment, 
such a delicacy of perception, exists not in any other work of human 
genius." 

It is a part of Landor's own delicacy in handling the 
passage that he postpones until another time the mention 
of its one flaw, namely, the fact that Galeotto is really 
an equivalent for Pandarus. Next to this example of 
what Landor could do in criticism, let us take, also from 
the Pentameron, an example of what he could do in alle- 
gory. This was a form of composition for which Landor 
had in general some contempt, especially when, as by 
Spenser, it was used as a foundation more or less shifting 
and dubious for an independent structure of romance. 
But the direct and unambiguous use of allegory in illus- 
tration of human life and experience he thought occasion- 



160 LANDOR. [chaf. 

ally permissible, and no one except the object of his aver- 
sion, Plato, has used it as well. Petrarch's allegory, or 
rather dream, in the Pentameron, is of love, sleep, and 
death. It is an example unmatched, as I think, in litera- 
ture, of the union of Greek purity of outline with Flor- 
entine poignancy of sentiment. The oftener we read it, 
the more strongly it attracts and holds us by the treble 
charm of its quiet, sober cadences, its luminous imagery, 
and its deep, consolatory wisdom. The thoughts and 
feelings concerning life and the issues of life, which it 
translates into allegorical shape, will be found to yield 
more and more meaning the closer they are grasped : 

"I had reflected for some time on this subject (the use and misuse 
of allegory, says Petrarch), when, wearied with the length of my walk 
over the mountains, and finding a soft old mole-hill covered with 
grey grass by the wayside, I laid my head upon it and slept, I can- 
not tell how long it was before a species of dream or vision came 
over me. 

" Two beautiful youths appeared beside me ; each was winged ; 
but the wings were hanging down, and seemed ill adapted to flight. 
One of them, whose voice was the softest I ever heard, looking at me 
frequently, said to the other, ' He is under my guardianship for the 
present; do not awaken him with that feather.' Methought, on 
hearing the whisper, I saw something like the feather of an arrow, 
and then the arrow itself — the whole of it, even to the point — al- 
though he carried it in such a manner that it was difficult at first to 
discover more than a palm's length of it ; the rest of the shaft (and 
the whole of the barb) was behind his ancles. 

" ' This feather never awakens any one,' replied he, rather petulant- 
ly, ' but it brings more of confident security, and more of cherished 
dreams than you, without me, are capable of imparting.' 

*' ' Be it so,' answered the gentler, ' none is less inclined to quarrel 
or dispute than I am. Many whom you have wounded grievously call 
upon me for succour, but so little am I disposed to thwart you it is 
seldom I venture to do more for them than to whisper a few words 
of comfort in passing. How many reproaches on these occasions 



VI.] THE PENTAMERON. 161 

have been cast upon me for indifference and infidelity ! Nearly as 
many, and nearly in the same terms as vipon you.' 

" ' Odd enough that we, Sleep ! should be thought so alike,' said 
Love, contemptuously. ' Yonder is he who bears a nearer resemblance 
to you ; the dullest have observed it.' 

" I fancied I turned my eyes to whei-e he was pointing, and saw at 
a distance the figure he designated. Meanwhile the contention went 
on uninterruptedly. Sleep was slow in asserting his power or his 
benefits Love recapitulated them, but only that he might assert his 
own above them. Suddenly he called on me to decide, and to choose 
my patron. Under the influence, first of the one, then of the other, 
I sprang from repose to rapture ; I alighted from rapture on repose, 
and knew not which was sweetest. Love was very angry with me, 
and declared he would cross me throughout the whole of my exist- 
ence. Whatever I might on other occasions have thought of his ve- 
racity, I now felt too surely the conviction that he would keep his 
word. At last, before the close of the altercation, the third genius 
had advanced, and stood near us. I cannot tell how I knew him, 
but I knew him to be the genius of Death. Breathless as I was at 
beholding him, I soon became familiar with his features. First they 
seemed only calm ; presently they became contemplative, and lastly, 
beautiful ; those of the Graces themselves are less regular, less har- 
monious, less composed. Love glanced at him unsteadily, with a 
countenance in which there was somewhat of anxiety, somewhat of 
disdain, and cried, ' Go away ! go away ! Nothing that thou touchest 
lives.' 

" ' Say rather, child,' replied the advancing form, and advancing 
grew loftier and statelier, ' say rather that nothing of beautiful or of 
glorious lives its own true life until my wing hath passed over it.' 

" Love pouted, and rumpled and bent down with his forefinger the 
stiff short feathers on his arrow-head, but replied not. Although he 
frowned worse than ever, and at me, I dreaded him less and less, 
and scarcely looked toward him. The milder and calmer genius, the 
third, in proportion as I took courage to contemplate him, regarded 
me with more and more complacency. He held neither flower nor 
arrow, as the others did ; but throwing back the clusters of dark curls 
that overshadowed his countenance, he presented to me his hand, 
openly and benignly. I shrank on looking at him so near, and yet I 
sighed to love him. He smiled, not without an expression of pity, at 
8 



;hap. ■ 

i 

; was ■ 



1G2 LAXDOR. [chap. 

perceiving my diffidence, my timidity ; for I remembered how soft was 
the hand of Sleep, how warm and entrancing was Love's, By degrees 
I grew ashamed of my ingratitude, and turning my face away, I held 
out my arms and felt my neck within his. Composure allayed all the 
throbbings of my bosom, the coolness of freshest morning breathed 
around, the heavens seemed to open above me, while the beautiful 
cheek of my deliverer rested on my head. I would now have looked 
for those others, but, knowing my intention by my gesture, he said, 
consolatorily — 

" ' Sleep is on his way to the earth, where many are calling him, 
but it is not to them he hastens ; for every call only makes him fly 
further off. Sedately and gravely as he looks, he is nearly as capri- 
cious and volatile as the more arrogant and ferocious one.' 

" ' And Love,' said I, ' whither is he departed ? If not too late, I 
would propitiate and appease him.' 

" ' He who cannot follow me, he who cannot overtake and pass me,' 
said the genius, ' is unworthy of the name, the most glorious in 
earth or heaven. Look up ! Love is yonder, and ready to receive 
thee.' 

" I looked ; the earth was under me ; I saw only the clear blue sky, 
and something brighter above it." 

The Pentameron bears on its title-page the date 1837, 
Before the book appeared a great change had come over 
Landor's life. He had said farewell to his beautiful home 
at Fiesole ; had turned his back upon his children ; up- 
rooted himself from all his household pleasures and occu- 
pations; and come back to live alone in England. In 
a poem introduced into the Pentameron itself, in which 
those pleasures and occupations are more fully described 
than in any other of his writings^ he looks upon them" 
already as things of the past. The piece is nominally 
quoted by Boccaccio as the work of an Italian gentleman 
forced to leave his country; it is really an address written 
by Landor from England to his youngest son " Carlino." 

To this second disruption of his home Landor had been 



Yi.J FIESOLE AND ENGLAND. 163 

forced by renewed dissensions with his wife. The Fieso- 
lan household had, in truth, been below the surface no 
harmonious or well-ordered one. A husband absorbed in 
his own imaginings, a wife more ready to make herself 
agreeable to any one else than to her husband, children 
devotedly loved, but none the less allowed to run wild, 
here were of themselves elements enough of domestic 
shipwreck. Add to this that Landor's own occasional 
bursts of passion would seem to have met more than their 
match in Mrs. Landor's persistent petulance of opposition. 
The immediate cause of his departure he himself, and at 
least one friendly witness, alleged to have been the lan- 
guage repeatedly, and " in the face of all remonstrances, 
addressed to him by his wife in presence of the children. 
This Landor had felt to be alike demoralizing to them and 
humiliating to himself, and had determined to endure it 
no longer. He left his home in the spring of 1835 ; spent 
the summer by himself at the baths of Lucca; reached 
England early in the autumn, stayed for three months with 
his friend Ablett at Llanbedr, and then went for the winter 
to Clifton. Next year he was for a long time again at 
Llanbedr, after which he stayed for a while in London, re- 
newing old friendships and forming -new. In the mean- 
time friends of both sides of the house had been endeav- 
ouring to bring about some kind of arrangement between 
the husband and wife. In the interests of the children, 
over whom Mrs. Landor confessed that she had no con- 
trol, it was proposed that while they and she should con- 
tinue to live together, whether in England or abroad, Lan- 
dor should establish himself, if not under the same roof, 
at any rate close by. At one time it was settled that the 
children should come to meet their father in Germany, 
and with that view Landor travelled to Heidelberg in 



164 LANDOK. . [chap. 

September, 1836. But they never came, nor were any of 
the other proposed arrangements in the end found practi- 
cable. Landor's children remained with their mother at 
Fiesole ; letters and presents continued to be exchanged 
between them and their father; twice or thrice in the 
coming years they came to visit him in England ; but 
they were practically lost to him henceforward. With 
his wife's relations living in this country he continued to 
be on perfectly cordial terms. The winter of 1836-'37 
he passed, like the last, at Clifton, where he and Southey, 
whose health and strength began about this time to fail, 
once more enjoyed the happiness of each other's society. 
From Clifton Landor went again, as on the previous year, 
first to stay with Ablett at Llanbedr, and then with Lady 
Blessington, now widowed, in London. The rest of the 
summer having been spent in visits at Torquay and Plym- 
outh, he finally settled down, in October, 1837, at Bath; 
and from this date a new period in his life begins. 

The two years between Landor's departure from Fiesole 
and his establishment at Bath had not been idly spent. 
The last touches had been added to Pericles and Aspasia, 
and a*good deal of the Pentameron had been for the first 
time written, either at the Baths of Lucca or afterwards 
in England. Other minor publications had quickly fol- 
lowed. First an Irish squib in verse, of which the less 
said the better, directed against the morality of the priest- 
hood, and entitled Terry Hogan. Next a political pam- 
phlet in the form of letters addressed to Lord Melbourne, 
and called Letters of a Conservative. The particular point 
to which these letters is directed is the remedy of episco- 
pal abuses in Wales; but they contain much political and 
personal matter of interest besides. For one thing they 
inform us of, what students of Landor seem hitherto to 



VI.] riESOLE AND ENGLAND. 166 

have overlooked, the precise shape which his long-cher- 
ished project of a history of his own times had latterly 
assumed, and of the end to which it had come : 

" It is known to many distinguished men, literary and political, of 
both parties, that I have long been occupied in writing a work, which 
I thought to entitle The Letters of a Conservative. In these I at- 
tempted to trace and to expose the faults and fallacies of every ad- 
ministration, from the beginning of the year one thousand seven 
hundred and seventy -five. I was born at the opening of that year ; 
and many have been my opportunities of conversing, at home and 
abroad, with those who partook in the events that followed it. ... I 
threw these papers into the fire ; no record of them is existing." 

Lan dor's reason for destroying his work had been the 
creditable one that its reprehension of some living states- 
men had come to him to seem more strong than was de- 
sirable to publish. In the course of the far narrower ar- 
gument to which his present Letters are directed, Landor 
finds occasion for these extremely characteristic observa- 
tions on the national and religious characteristics of the 
Welsh, to whom, after his prolonged visits at Llanbedr, 
he feels more kindly now than of yore, in comparison with 
those of the Irish : 

" In the Irish we see the fire and vivacity of a southern people : 
their language, their religion, every thought is full of images. They 
have been, and ever must be, idolaters. Do not let their good clergy 
be angry with me for the expression. I mean no harm by it. Firm- 
ly do I believe that the Almighty is too merciful and too wise for 
anger or displeasure at it. Would one of these kind-hearted priests 
be surly at being taken for another ? Certainly not : and quite as 
certainly the Maker of mankind will graciously accept their grati- 
tude, whether the offering be laid in the temple or on the turf, 
whether in the enthusiasm of the heart, before a beautiful image, 
expressing love and benignity, or, without any visible object, in the 
bleak and desert air. 



166 LANDOR. [chap. 

" The Welshman is serious, concentrated, and morose ; easily of- 
fended, not easily appeased ; strongly excited by religious zeal ; but 
there is melancholy in the musick of his mind. Cimmerian gloom 
is hanging still about his character ; and his God is the God of the 
mountain and the storm," 

One more equally characteristic quotation, and we may 
close the Letters of a Conservative. 

" The Bishop of London groaned at an apparition in Ireland : and 
a horrible one it was indeed. A clergyman was compelled by the 
severity of Fortune, or, more Christianly speaking, by the wiles and 
maliciousness of Satan, to see his son work in his garden. 

" Had the right reverend baron passed my house, early in the 
morning, or late in the evening, the chances are that he would have 
found me doing the same thing, and oftentimes more unprofitably ; 
that is, planting trees from which some other will gather the fruit. 
Would his mitred head have turned giddy to see me on a ladder, 
pruning or grafting my peaches ? I should have been sorry for it, 
not being used to come down until my work was over, even when 
visitors no less illustrious than the right reverend baron have called 
on me. But we have talked together in our relative stations ; I 
above, they below." 

Besides this, Landor contributed in 1837 to Leigh 
Hunt's Monthly Repository a series of dialogues and let- 
ters called High and Loiu Life in Ltaly, which are good in 
proportion to their gravity ; the majority, being facetious, 
are somewhat forced and dreary. A rare volume, and one 
much cherished by the lovers of Landor, is that which Mr. 
Ablett printed for private distribution in this same year 
1837; It contains a lithograph from Count D'Orsay's 
profile of Landor drawn in 1825; a dedication or inscrip- 
tion two pages long, and in the most mincingly ceremo- 
nious vein, to Mrs. Ablett by her husband, and a selection 
from the Conversations and other fugitive pieces which 



VI.] FIESOLE AND ENGLAND. 167 

Landor liad contributed to various periodicals since his 
visit to England five years before; besides some extracts 
from Leigh Hunt, and one or two effusions which appear 
to be Mr. Ablett's own. 

Lastly, Landor printed, still in the autumn of 1837, a 
pamphlet in rhyming couplets which he called A Satire 
on Satirists, and Admonition to Detractors. This is an 
attempt in a manner of writing which he had abandoned 
since boyhood. Landor had allowed himself for once to 
be irritated by a review ; an attack, namely, on his scholar- 
ship (accompanied, it should be said, with general criti- 
cisms of a laudatory kind), which had appeared in Black- 
wood. He now indulged, clumsily it must be confessed, 
in the somewhat stale entertainment of baitino; Scotch re- 
viewers. The only things which make the Satire note- 
worthy are the lines in which Landor alludes to his own 
scene of Agamemnon and Iphigenia — 

" Far from the footstool of the tragic throne, 
I am tragedian in this scene alone " — 

and the passages in which he allows himself to turn 
against the old object of his respect and admiration, 
Wordsworth. He had been letting certain remarks ut- 
tered by or attributed to Wordsworth rankle in his mind. 
He had begun to discover, during his visit in 1832, the 
narrow intellectual sympathies of that great poet, and his 
indifference to the merits of nearly all poetry except his 
own. Now again, in the summer of 1837, Landor had 
seen or imagined Wordsworth cold, while every one else 
was enthusiastic, when they were present together at the 
first night of Talfourd's Ion. Lastly, it had been related 
to him that Wordsworth had said he would not give five 
shillings a ream for the poetry of Southey. Never in the 



168 LANDOR. [chap. 

least degree jealous on his own account, Landor was in- 
tensely so on account of his friend, and forgetting the life- 
long intimacy and regard of Wordsworth and Southey, 
thought proper to call the former to account as a "De- 
tractor." The lines in which he does so are not good ; 
they hit what was to some extent really a blot in Words- 
worth's nature ; but they had much better never have been 
written ; and we think with regret of the old phrases of 
regard — "vm', civis, philosophe, poeta, prcestantissime,^'' and 
" When 'mid their light thy light appears." Wordsworth, 
to whose notice the attack was only brought some time 
after it appeared, was little ruffled by it. Neither was 
Landor, on his part, when Crabbe Robinson strongly re- 
monstrated with him on his Satire, the least offended. 
Among other things, Landor had referred to his own lines 
on the Shell, from Gehir, as being " the bar from which 
Wordsworth drew his wire" in a nearly analogous passage 
of the Excursion. Wordsworth denied any conscious imi- 
tation. It may at this point not be without interest to 
compare Landor's original lines, the best known in all his 
poetry, with those in which they were thus echoed by his 
brother poets, accidentally, it seems, by Wordsworth, and 
avowedly by Byron. In the original it is the sea-nymph 
who proposes the shell as an appropriate forfeit to be paid 
by her to Tamar if he beats her in wrestling : 

" But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue 
Within, and they that lustre have imbibed 
In the Sun's palace-porch, where, when unyoked, 
His chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave ; 
Shake one, and it awakens ; then apply 
Its polisht lip to your attentive ear, 
And it remembers its august abodes, 
And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there." 



vij riESOLE AND ENGLAND. 169 

Byron's lines in The Island compare the subdued sound 
of the sea at sunset with that to be heard in the shell ; and 
it is of a piece with his usual swinging carelessness that 
the " murmurer " of one line is made to " rave," three 
lines further on, 

" The Ocean scarce spoke louder with his swell 
Than breathes his mimic murmurer in the shell, 
As, far divided from his parent deep, 
The sea-born infant cries, and will not sleep, 
Raising his little plaint in vain, to rave 
For the broad bosom of his nursing wave." 

Wordsworth turns the phenomenon to account for the 
purposes of a fine metaphj^sical and didactic metaphor, 
describing it at the same time in lines which, compared 
with any of those in the passage from Oehir except the 
fourth and fifth, are somewhat lumbering and diluted. 
The shell, Landor said, had in this version lost its pearly 
hue within, and its memory of where it had abided. 

"I have seen 
A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract 
Of inland ground, applying to his ear 
The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell ; 
To which, in silence hush'd, his very soul 
Listen'd intensely ; and his countenance soon 
Brighten'd with joy ; for murmurings from within 
Were heard, sonorous cadences ! whereby, 
To his belief, the monitor express'd 
Mysterious union with its native sea. 
Even such a Shell the universe itself * 

Is to the ear of faith." 

In Landor's general criticisms on Wordsworth's poetry, 

from this time forward, there is perceptible less change of 

tone than in those on his person. The great achievement 

of Wordsworth, his poetical revelation of a sympathy, more 

M 8* 



1*70 LANDOR. [chap, 






close and binding than had ever before been expressed in 
words, between the hearts of nature and of man, had in it 
too mucb of the metaphysical for Landor at any time fully 
to appreciate. But now, as formerly, Wordsworth re- 
mained for Landor a fine poet, although marred by pue- 
rility and dulness; the best of all poets of country life; 
the author of the best sonnets, after one or two of Milton^ 
in the language ; and, in his Laodamia, of at least one 
poem classical both in thought and expression. 



CHAPTER yiL 

LIFE AT BATH — DRAMAS — HELLENICS LAST FRUIT DRT 

STICKS. 

[1837—1858.] • 

During the two unsettled years that followed his return 
to England, Landor, as we have seen, continued to write 
as industriously as ever. Neither is there perceptible in 
the works so produced the shadow of any severe inward 
struggle or distress. Did Landor then really, we cannot 
help asking ourselves, feel very deeply the breaking up of 
his beautiful Italian home or not ? A few years before he 
could not bear his children to be out of his sight even for 
a day ; did he suffer as we should have expected him to 
suffer at his total separation from them now ? 

The poem of which mention has been made in the last 
chapter treats of their pleasures and occupations at the 
Villa Gherardesca in a tone of affectionate, but by no 
means inconsolable, regret. Another retrospective piece, 
written at Torquay in 1837, touches on the same matters 
in a still lighter strain. A brief and probably somewhat 
earlier Farewell to Italy^ in blank verse, is a good deal 
graver in its tone ; but the only instance, except once or 
twice in his letters, in which Landor writes of his changed 
life in a strain at all approaching despondency, is in the 
following set of verses composed on one of his birthdays ; 



1'72 LANDOR. [chap. 

verses which happen also to be among his best ; classically 
simple and straightforward in thought and diction, and in 
cadence unusually full and solemn : 

" The day returns, my natal day, 

Borne on the storm and pale with snow, 
And seems to ask me why I stay. 
Stricken by Time and bow'd by Woe. 

"Many were once the friends who came 
To wish me joy ; and there are some 
Who wish it now ; but not the same ; 
They are whence friends can never come; 

"Nor are they you my love watcht o'er 
Cradled in innocence and sleep ; 
You smile into my eyes no more, 
Nor see the bitter tears they weep." 

The same question which we have thus been led to ask 
ourselves as to the depth or lack of depth in Landor's 
private and domestic feelings, seems to have been addressed 
to him in person by some friend about this time. Here 
is his reply : 

" So, then, I feel not deeply ! if I did, 
I should have seized the pen and pierced therewith 
The passive world ! 

And thus thou reasonest ? 
Well hast thou known the lover's, not so well 
The poet's heart : while that heart bleeds, the hand 
Presses it close. Grief must run on and pass 
Into near Memory's more quiet shade 
Before it can compose itself in song. 
He who is agonized and turns to show 
His agony to those who sit around. 
Seizes the pen in vain : thought, fancy, power, 
Rush back into his bosom ; all the strength 



[AP. ■ 
]Ur 1 

I 



VII.] LIFE AT BATH. lis 

• Of genius cannot draw them into light 
From under mastering Grief ; but Memory, 
The Muse's mother, nurses, rears them up, 
Informs, and keeps them with her all her days." 

As a critical reflexion of general application, there is jus- 
tice in the thought here expressed with so much graceful- 
ness and precision ; but as solving the point raised in rela- 
tion to Landor's own character, the answer can hardly be 
taken as sufficient. We must remember on the one hand 
that his principles, both in life and literature, tended to- 
wards the suppression and control of emotion rather than 
towards its indulgence and display. In life his ambition 
was to walk " with Epicurus on the right hand and Epic- 
tetus on the left :" in literature, to attain the balance and 
self-governance of the Greeks. For the former effort Lan- 
dor's character unfitted him ; his temperament was too 
strong for his philosophy ; in the latter effort he succeed- 
ed, and a part of the peculiar quality of his writing pro- 
ceeds from its expression of the most impetuous feelings 
and judgments in a style of classical sobriety and reserve. 
But stormy as was Landor's nature upon the surface, we 
may still doubt whether its depths were ever so strongly 
moved by the things of real life as by the things of imag- 
ination. The bitterest tears he shed would seem by his 
own confession to have been those which were drawn from 
him, not by the sorrows and estrangements of his own ex- 
perience, but by moving passages of literature, and the mis- 
fortunes of old-world heroines and heroes. " Most things," 
he writes to Lady Blessington, " are real to me except re- 
alities.''' The realities, moreover, which did affect him were 
chiefly the realities of to-day, and not those of yesterday 
or to-morrow. A wrench once made, a tie once broken, 
he could accommodate himself without too much suffering 



174 LANDOR. [cuap. 

to the change. Neither the sense of continuity nor the 
sense of responsibility in human relations seems to have 
been practically very strong in him. The injury done to 
his children by leaving them subject to no discipline at 
such an age and in such surroundings, would appear hard- 
ly to have weighed on Landor's mind at all, and that it 
failed to do so is, I think, the most serious blot upon his 
character. 

His own answer would have been that to separate the 
children from their mother would have been cruel, and to 
let them continue witnesses of her altercations with him- 
self, impossible. The visits which as they grew up they 
came at long intervals to pay him in England, were at first 
ardently anticipated, but failed to lead to any relations of 
close or lasting sympathy. In all that concerned their ma- 
terial welfare, he had in the meanwhile shown himself as 
unreservedly generous as ever. Landor's estates of Llan- 
thony and Ipsley were yielding at this time upwards of 
three thousand pounds a year, of which mortgages and in- 
surances absorbed every year about fourteen hundred. Out 
of the remaining sixteen hundred a year he had been in 
the habit, during his life at Ipsley, of spending altogether 
not much over six, allowing the balance to accumulate for 
the benefit of his younger children. When he left Fiesole, 
he dispossessed himself, in the interest of his eldest son 
Arnold, of his property in the villa, with its farms and gar- 
dens, which of themselves were almost sufficient for the 
support of the family. At the same time he made over 
to Mrs. Landor two -thirds of the income which he had 
been accustomed to spend while they were all under one 
roof, reserving to himself the other third only, that is about 
two hundred pounds a year. Finding this after a year or 
two's experience in England insufficient, he allowed him- 



VII.] LIFE AT BATH. 175 

self as mucli more out of the share hitherto suffered to ac- 
cumulate for the younger children, making four hundred 
pounds a' year in all. On this income Landor lived, and 
was perfectly content to live, in the solitary home which 
he had by this time made for himself in a Bath lodging. 

His solitud'e was not morose or devoid of consolations. 
In Bath itself he found friends after his own heart, and 
first among them Colonel, afterwards Sir William, Napier, 
the historian of the Peninsular War, with whom for years 
it was Landor's habit to spend a part of almost every day. 
He enjoyed, moreover, the tender regard and devotion of 
his wife's niece, Teresita Stopford, afterwards Lady Charles 
Beauclerk, as well as of another young lady, Rose Paynter, 
now Lady Sawle, a connexion of the Aylraer family, whose 
name and lineage revived old days and old affections in 
his mind. He was accustomed during the earlier part of 
his Bath life to pay visits nearly every year to a certain 
number of chosen friends, and most regularly of all to Lady 
Blessington. Throughout the long strain and fever of her 
brilliant, irregular social career at Grore House, beset by 
cares and crowds, and hard pressed by the consequences of 
her own and D'Orsay's profusion, this lady never lost the 
warmth and constancy of heart which so rarely accompany 
promiscuous hospitality, yet without which hospitality is 
but dust and ashes.^ She taug-ht Landor to resi:ard Gore 
House as a kind of second home, and he came to entertain 
quite a tender feeling for the room which was always kept 
for him there, and especially for a certain lilac and a cer- 
tain laurel that used to come into blossom about the time 
of his yearly visit. At Gore House he made, and from 
time to time refreshed, an acquaintance with many of the 
most distinguished men of the then rising generation. His 
closest friends of that generation were Forster and Dick- 



176 LANDOR. [chap. 

ens, who attached themselves to him, the former especial- I 
ly, with an enthusiastic warmth of admiration and regard, t! 
Besides Lady Blessington, we find Landor in the habit of 
paying visits to his old friend Kenyon at Wimbledon, to A' 
Julius Hare, now installed as archdeacon at the family liv- 
ing of Hurstmonceaux, to Ablett in Wales, to Lord Nugent 
near Aylesbury, to Sir William Molesworth at Pencarrow, 
to his brother Robert in his beautiful rectory at Birling- 
ham, to his sisters at Warwick, and to his wife's sisters at 
Richmond. 

Wherever Landor went he made the same impression, 
which was that of a king and a lion among men. In ap- 
pearance he had gained greatly with age. As sturdy and 
as florid as ever, he was now in addition beautifully vener- 
able. His bold and keen grey eyes retained all their pow- 
er, his teeth remained perfectly strong and white, but his 
forehead had become bald and singularly imposing, high- 
vaulted, broad and full beneath its thick white fringe of 
backward -flowing hair. Every man's face, as has been 
truly said, is in great part his own making ; and the char- 
acters which time had imprinted on Landor's were not 
those of his transient bursts of fury, but those of his ha- 
bitual moods of lofty thought and tender feeling. All the 
lines of his countenance were large and, except when the 
fit was upon him, full of benignity, his smile especially 
being of an inexpressible sweetness. His movements were 
correspondingly massive, but at the same time clumsy ; 
not, of course, with the clumsiness of ill-breeding, but rath- 
er with that of aimlessness and inefficiency. The physi- 
cal signs of the unpractical man were indeed all of them 
written upon Landor. He had short arms, with con- 
strained movements of the elbows, and even when his fists 
were clenched in wrath there was a noticeable relaxation 



til] life at bath. IIT 

about the thumbs, a thing never yet seen to accompany 
tenacity of practical will or tact in practical dealings. He 
■would put his spectacles up over his forehead, and after 
oversetting everything in the wildest search for them, sub- 
mit himself with desperate resignation to their loss. In 
travellino- he would o-ive himself worlds of trouble to re- 
member the key of his portmanteau, but utterly forget the 
portmanteau itself; and when he discovered that he had 
lost it, he would launch out into an appalling picture of 
the treachery and depravity of the railway officials con- 
cerned, and of their fathers and grandfathers to the re- 
motest generation. Next, after a moment's silence, the 
humourous view of the case would present itself to him, 
and he would begin to laugh, quietly at first, and then in 
louder and ever louder volleys, until the room shook again, 
and the commotion seemed as if it would never stop. 
These tempests of hilarity seemed to some of Landor's 
friends almost as formidable as the tempests of anger to 
which he continued to be subject at the suspicion of a 
contradiction or a slight. But both were well worth un- 
dergoing for the sake of such noble and winning company 
as was that of Landor in his ordinary moods. Then not 
only was his talk incomparably rich and full, it was deliver- 
ed with such a courtly charm of manner and address, such 
a rotundity, mellowness, and old-world grace of utterance 
as were irresistible. His voice, especially in reading aloud, 
was as sympathetic as it was powerful ; "fibrous in all its 
tones, whether gentle or fierce," says Lord Houghton ; deep, 
rich, and like the noblest music, "with a small, inartificial 
quiver striking to the heart," adds another witness, who 
by-and-by attached herself to the grand old man with a 
filial devotion, and who has left us the most life-like as 
well as the most affectionate portrait of him during these 



SAP. 1 1 



178 LANDOR. [chap. 

years.^ His pronunciation of certain words was that tra- 
ditional in many old English families : " yallcr " and " lay- J] 
lock" for yellow and lilac, "goold," " Room," and " woon- 
derful," for gold, Rome, and wonderful. A\ 

Even at his wildest, Landor's demeanour to his pet ani- 
mals furnished assurance enough that his fury was much 
more loud than deep, and that the quality most rooted in 
his nature was its gentleness. Dickens has best embodied 
this impression in his character of Mr. Boythorn in Bleak 
House, which is drawn, as is well known, from Landor, 
with his intellectual greatness left out. We all remember 
how Mr. Boythorn softly caresses his canary with his fore- 
finger, at the same time as he thunders out defiance and 
revenge against Sir Leicester Dedlock: "He brings ac- 
tions for trespass ; I bring actions for trespass. He brings 
actions for assault and battery ; I defend them, and con- 
tinue to assault and batter. Ha ! ha ! ha !" Landor's 
great pet in these days was not really a canary, but a yel- 
low Pomeranian dog, all vivacity, affection, and noise, who 
was sent him from Fiesole in 1844, and became the de- 
light and companion of his life. With " Pomero " Lan- 
dor would prattle in English and Italian as affectionately 
as a mother with her child. Pomero was his darling, the 
wisest and most beautiful of his race ; Pomero had the 
brightest eyes and the most " woonderful yaller tail" ever 
seen. Sometimes it was Landor's humour to quote Po- 
mero in speech and writing as a kind of sagacious elder 
brother, whose opinion had to be consulted on all subjects 
before he would deliver his own. This creature accom- 
panied his master wherever he went, barking "not fiercely, 
but familiarly" at friend and stranger, and when they came 
in, would either station himself upon his master's head to 

^ See Prefatory Note, No. 10. 



vii.] LITE AT BATH. 179 

watch the people passing in the street, or else lie curled 
up in his basket until Landor, in talk with some visitor, 
began to laugh, and his laugh to grow and grow, when 
Pomero would spring up, and leap upon and fume about 
him, barking and screaming for sympathy until the whole 
street resounded. The two together, master and dog, were 
for years to be encountered daily on their walks about 
Bath and its vicinity, and there are many who perfectly 
well remember them ; the majestic old man, looking not 
a whit the less impressive for his rusty and dusty brown 
suit, his bulging boots, his rumpled linen, or his battered 
hat ; and his noisy, soft-haired, quick-glancing, inseparable 
companion. 

Landor's habits were to breakfast at nine, and write 
principally before noon. His mode of writing was pecul- 
iar ; he would sit absorbed in apparently vacant thought, 
but inwardly giving the finishing touches to the verses or 
the periods which he had last been maturing while he 
walked or lay awake at night ; when he was ready, he 
would seize suddenly on one of the many scraps of paper 
and one of the many stumps of swan's-quill that usually 
lay at hand, and would write down what was in his head 
hastily, in his rough sloping characters, sprawling or com- 
pressed according to the space, and dry the written paper 
in the ashes. At two he dined, either alone or in the 
company of some single favoured friend, often on viands 
which he hacj himself bought and dressed, and with the 
accompaniment, when the meal was shared by a second 
person, of a few glasses of some famous vintage from the 
family cellar. In the afternoon he walked several miles 
in all weathers, having a special preference for a village 
near Bath (Widcombe), in the beautiful churchyard of 
which he had now determined that he should be buried. 



180 LANDOR. [chap. 



li 



I 



From about seven in the evening, after the simplest pos 
sible tea, he generally read till late at night. His walls 
were covered with bad pictures, which he bought cheap, I 
as formerly from the dealers of Florence, so now from 
those of Bath, and which his imagination endowed with 
every sign and every circumstance of authenticity. 

In this manner twenty long years went by, during 
which Landor passed with little abatement of strength 
from elderly to patriarchal ?.ge. As time went on, the 
habits of his life changed almost imperceptibly. The cir- 
cuit of his walks grew narrower; his visits to London 
and elsewhere less frequent. His friends of the younger 
generation, Dickens and Forster especially, and without 
fail, were accustomed every year to run down to Bath 
and bear him company on his birthday, the 30th of Janu- 
ary. Carlyle, whose teDiper of hero-worship found much 
that was congenial in Lander's writings, and who delight- 
ed in the sterling and vigorous qualities of the man, once 
made the same journey in order to visit him. I do not 
know whether the invitation was ever accepted which 
Landor addressed to another illustrious juD^r^i m the fol- 
lowing scrap of friendly doggrel : 

" I entreat you, Alfred Tennyson, 
Come and share my haunch of veniso«> 
I have too a bin of claret, 
Good, but better when you share it. 
Tho' 'tis only a small bin, • 

There's a stock of it within ; 
And, as sure as I'm a rhymer. 
Half a butt of Rudesheimer. 
Come ; among the sons of men is one 
"Welcomer than Alfred Tennyson ?" 

With several of the younger poets and men of letters of 



til] life at bath. 181 

those days Landor's prompt and cordial recognition of 
literary excellence had put him on terms of the friendliest 
correspondence and regard. But his friends of his own 
standing were beginning to fall about him fast. 

" We hurry to the river we must cross, 

And swifter downward every footstep wends ; 
Happy who reach it ere they count the loss 
Of half their faculties and half their friends." 

Thus Landor had written in his ode to Southey in 1833. 
Six years later Southey's mind had suddenly given way, 
and in 1843 he died, the name of Landor having been one 
of the last upon his lips while a glimmering of conscious- 
ness remained to him. Of the various tributes to his 
memory which Landor wrote at the time, that in the form 
of a vision, beginning 

"It was a dream, ah ! what is not a dream ?" 

is conspicuous for its beauty, singularity, and tenderness. 
Francis Hare had died in middle age at Palermo three 
years earlier. Landor's next great loss was that of his 
dear friend and loyal admirer Ablett, who died in 1848. 
Within two years followed the death of Landor's brother 
Charles, and almost at the same time that of Lady Bles- 
sington. The long-impending crash had at last overtaken 
the establishment in Gore House ; the house itself had 
been sold with all its contents and adjacencies ; Count 
D'Orsay had followed the fortunes of Louis Napoleon to 
France, whither Lady Blessington soon went also, and 
where she died in 1850 at St. Germain. Again Landor 
has commemorated his affection and his sense of his loss 
in his best vein of graceful and meditative verse. It had 
been one of Landor's great consolations during a portion 



1S2 LANDOR. [chap. 

of his life at Bath that Madame de Molande had been liv- 
ing in that city with her grandchildren. In August, 1851, 
she too died in France. It was just forty-five years since 
he had written his lament for the necessity which forced 
them to part in the days of their early passion : 

" lanthe, thou art called across the sea, ■ 
A path forbidden me /" 

Let us quote in this connexion, not any of the commem- 
orative lines which Landor wrote on receiving the news 
of her death, but rather those other verses of grave self- 
confidence and assured appeal to the ages with which, it 
does not appear precisely at what date, he set a fitting and 
final seal on the poetry referring to this episode of his 

life. 

" Well I remember how you smiled 

To see me write your name upon 
The soft sea-sand. . . . what a child/ 
You think you're writing upon stone ! 

" I have since written what no tide 
Shall ever wash away, what men 
Unborn shall read o'er ocean wide, 
And find lanthe's name again." 

All these deaths would naturally have prepared Lan- 
dor's mind for his own, had he stood in need of such 
preparation. But he had long faced tj^at contingency 
with the same composure with which others are encour- 
aged to face it in so many of his tender and heroic ad- 
monitions. Of each successive birthday as it came round 
he felt as though it might naturally be his last. It was 
on the morning after his seventy -fifth that he wrote and 
read aloud before breakfast those lines which he after- 
wards prefixed to the volume called Last Fruit : 



VII.] LIFE AT r.ATH. 183 

"I strove with none, for none was worth my strife: 
Nature I loved, and, next to nature, Art ; 
I warmed both hands before the fire of life ; 
It sinks, and I am ready to depart." 

Infinitely touching seemed his dignified, resigned air and 
beautiful manly voice to the girlish friend whom he at 
this time called daughter, and who was standing by as he 
read ; and when he saw how he had brought the tears 
into her eyes, the old man came across and patted her 
shoulder, saying, " My good child ! I really think you 
love your father almost as well as Pomero does." But 
the summons to depart was destined to come to many an- 
other yet of those dear to Landor before it came to him- 
self. Within three years after the losses last mentioned, 
there followed those of his sister Elizabeth and of his 
ever-faithful friend, the accomplished and pure -hearted 
Julius Hare. By his lips, as by Southey's, Landor's was 
one of the last names ever spoken. Next went Kenyon ; 
and next, having lived beyond the common age of his 
kind, died Pomero, leaving the daily footsteps of the old 
man more alone than ever. 

But it is time that we should go back, and acquaint 
ourselves with the nature of the work in literature which 
Landor had been doing during this long autumn of his 
life in England. His whole literary career may best, I 
think, be divided into three periods — the first of twenty- 
six years, from 1795 to 1821 ; the second of sixteen, from 
1821 to 1837; and the third, incredible as it sounds, 
again of twenty -six, from 1837 to 1863. The first period, 
as we have seen, was one of experiment only partially fe- 
licitous ; experiment chiefly in the highest kinds of poetry 
and in the serious employment of Latin for the purposes 
of original modern writing ; its principal achievements are 



184 LANDOR. [chap. 

Gehir, Count Julian, and the Idyllia Heroica. The sec- 
ond period, from 1821 to 1837, that is from Landor's 
forty-sixth year to his sixty-second, is the period of his 
central and greatest work, consisting chiefly of dramatic 
or quasi- dramatic writings in prose; its principal achieve- 
ments are the Imaginary Conversations, the Examination 
of Shakspeai'e, Pericles and Asjmsia, and the Pentameron. 
The third period, upon which we have now entered, in- 
cludes all the rest of Landor's life, from his sixty-second 
year to his eighty-eighth (1837 — 1863), and is one of mis- 
cellaneous production in many kinds of writing, with a 
preponderance, on the whole, of verse. From composition 
in one form or another Landor never rested long. He 
declared over ^nd over again his unalterable resolution to 
give up writing, somethnes in a fit of disgust, sometimes 
lest as he grew older his powers should fail him unawares. 
But such resolutions were no sooner made than broken. 
He worked now to satisfy his own impulse, now to please 
a friend who was also an editor. In all his literary under- 
takings throughout this third period he was in the habit 
of acting on the advice and with the help of Mr. Forster ; 
advice generally discreet, and help at all times ungrudg- 
inp". The misfortune is that this most unselfish of friends 
should have proved also the least self-forgetful of biogra- 
phers, and the least capable of keeping his own services in 
the background. 

Landor's first important publication during the Bath 
period was in the form of dramatic verse. Being laid up 
with a sprained ancle, he occupied himself with compos- 
ing first one play and then another on the story of Gio- 
vanna of Naples. In reality that story is as dark with 
crime and uncertainty, and as lightning-lit with flashes of 
romance, and with the spell of beauty accused yet wor- 



ni.] DRAMAS. 185 

shipped, as is tlie story of Mary Queen of Scots herself. 
Landor's version of it corresponds to none that will be 
found in histories. " I am a horrible confounder of his- 
torical facts," he writes. " I have usually one history that 
I' have read, and another that I have invented." It was 
like his chivalry that he, as a matter of course, took the 
favourable view of the queen's character, and like his 
hatred of the Romish priesthood that he made the court 
confessor, Fra Rupert, the villain of his plot and the con- 
triver of the murder of the queen's husband. The first 
of his two plays Landor named after the victim of the 
murder, Andrea of Hungary ; the second after the queen 
herself. The volume appeared in 1839, with a prologue 
in verse addressed to his young friend " Rose," and an in- 
timation that the profits of the sale were intended to be 
handed over to Grace Darling. From first to last it was 
Landor's habit thus to destine to some charitable object 
the profits which in perfect good faith, and in defiance of 
reiterated experience, his imagination invariably anticipated 
from the sale of his works. 

Within a couple of years Landor had written and pub- 
lished separately yet another play, which completed this 
Neapolitan trilogy, and which he called after the name of 
the villain Fra Rupert. The scenes of this trilogy are as 
deficient in sustained construction and dramatic sequence 
as Count Julian itself. They are pitched in a lower key, 
and written with more variety of style, than that unmiti- 
gated and Titanic tragedy. The character of the young 
king, with his boorish training and his chivalrous nature, 
from the neglected soil of which all the latent virtues are 
drawn forth by the loving wisdom of Giovanna, is a new 
conception excellently worked out. The figure of Fra Ru- 
pert, on the other hand, and that of Rienzi^ seem to me 
N 9 



186 'lANDOR. [chap. 

types somewhat boyish and overcharged, the one of brutal 
coarseness and brutal craft, the other of the demoralization 
consequent upon the exercise of unlimited power. Among 
the feminine personages we find, as always in the work 
of Landor, the most beautifully conceived traits of great- 
hearted sweetness and devotion ; varied, however, in light- 
er moments with others like the following : 

" Any one now would say you thought me handsome," 

exclaims Fiammetta to Boccaccio ; a royal princess, be it 
remembered, to a clerkly and courtly poet. Taken as col- 
lections ,of separate scenes, these plays, unsatisfactory as 
plays, are full of fine feeling, and of solid activity and in- 
genuity of conception. A curious point in relation to the 
second of the three is that it bears in some points of plot 
and situation a remarkably close resemblance to a tragedy 
on the same subject published anonymously fifteen years 
before, under the title of Count Arezzi. This piece when 
it appeared had by some been taken for the work of By- 
ron, and for a few days had been on that account in much 
demand. Its real author had been no other than Landor's 
own brother Robert. When the resemblance was brought 
to Walter Landor's notice he seemed utterly unable to ac- 
count for it, having to the best of his knowledge never 
either seen or heard of Count Arezzi. But he was subject 
to forgetfulness equally complete when, after the lapse of 
a few years, passages of his own writing were recited to 
him ; and the impression retained by Mr. Robert Landor 
was that his brother must have read his play when it first 
appeared, and, forgetting the fact afterwards, preserved 
portions of it in his mind by an act of purely unconscious 
recollection. In conduct and construction, indeed, the 
plays written by Robert Landor are better than any by 



Yii.] DRAMAS. 18'7 

his illustrious brother. There was much in common be- 
tween the two men. Robert Landor had nearly every- 
thing of Walter except the passionate energy of his tem- 
perament and his genius. He was an admirable scholar, 
and in his dramas of Count Arezzi, The Earl of Brecon, 
Faith's Fraud, and The Ferryman, and his didactic ro- 
mances, The Fountain of Arethusa and the Fawn of Ser- 
torius, he shows himself master of a sound English style 
and a pure and vigorous vein of feeling and invention. 
Personally, he was the prince of gentlemen ; of a notably 
fine presence, taller than his eldest brother, and of equally 
distinguished bearing, without his brother's irascibilities. 
He had the same taste for seclusion, and lived almost un- 
known at his beautiful rectory of Birlingham, contented 
with his modest private fortune, and spending on charity 
the entire income of his living. After the brothers had 
parted in 1816 at Como, a coldness had arisen between 
them, and it was only now, when the elder had returned to 
England, that they were again on the old terms of mutual 
affection and respect. 

Soon after this trilogy it would appear that Landor 
wrote the last of his complete plays, the Siege of Ancona. 
This subject, with its high-pitched heroisms, its patriotisms 
and invincibilities, suited Landor well, and the play, al- 
though the least noticed by his critics, is I think, upon 
the whole, his best. I do not know whether it was of these 
four dramas, and of Count Julian in especial, or of all Lan- 
dor's dramatic and quasi-dramatic writings together, that 
Mr. Browning was thinking when, a few years later, he 
dedicated to Landor, as " a great dramatic poet," the vol- 
ume containing his own two plays of Luria and the SouVs 
Tragedy. The letter written by the elder poet in acknowl- 
edgment of this tribute from the younger is so character^ 



lAP. f ] 



188 LANDOR. [chap, 

istic alike of his genial friendliness to his brother authors, 
and of the broad and manly justice of his habitual criti- 
cisms both on himself and others, that I cannot deny my- 
self the pleasure of quoting it : 

"Accept my thanks for the richest of Easter offerings made to any 
one for many years. I staid at home last evening on purpose to 
read I/uria, and if I lost any good music (as I certainly did) I was 
well compensated in kind. To-day I intend to devote the rainy 
hours entirely to Tlie SouVs Tragedy. I wonder whether I shall find 
it as excellent as Luria, You have conferred too high a distinction 
on me in your graceful inscription. I am more of a dramatist in 
prose than in poetry. My ima^nation, like my heart, has always 
been with the women, I mean the young, for I cannot separate 
that adjective from that substantive. This has taught me above 
all things the immeasurable superiority of Shakspeare. His women 
raise him to it. I mean the immensity of the superiority ; the supe- 
riority would exist without, I am sometimes ready to shed tears at 
his degradation in Comedy. I would almost have given the first 
joint of my fore-finger rather than he should have written, for in- 
stance, such trash as that in the Two Gentlemen of Verona. His 
wit is pounded, and spiced, and potted, and covered with rancidity 
at last. A glass of champagne at Moliere's is very refreshing af^ 
ter this British spirit. Go on and pass us poor devils ! If you do 
not go far ahead of me, I will crack my whip at you and make you 
spring forward. So, to use a phrase of Queen Elizabeth, 

" ' Yours as you demean yourself,' 

"W.Landor." 

Returning to the years 1839-'42, Landor in this inter- 
val, besides his trilogy of plays, published in Mr. Forster's 
review, and at his request, Criticisms, in his ripest and 
soundest vein, on Theocritus, Catullus, and Petrarch ; and 
by the advice of the same friend withheld from publication 
a reply to an adverse review of the Pentameron which he 
at the time, apparently in error, attributed to Hallam. In 
this reply Landor had both defended and supplemented 



VII.] COLLECTED WORKS. 189 

the view of Daiite which he had ptit forward in the De- 
cameron, and had in his grandest manner set forth what 
he conceived to be the qualifications necessary for the 
right appreciation of that master : 

" Mr. Landor has no more questioned the sublimity or the profound- 
ness of Dante, than his readers will question whether he or his critic 
is the more competent to measure them. To judge properly and 
comprehensively of Dante, first the poetical mind is requisite ; then, 
patient industry in exploring the works of his contemporaries, and 
in going back occasionally to those volumes of the schoolmen which 
lie dormant in the libraries of his native city. Profitable too are ex- 
cursions in Val d'Arno and Val d'Elsa, and in those deep recesses of 
the Apennines where the elder language is yet abiding in its rigid 
strength and fresh austerity. Twenty years and unbroken leisure 
have afforded to Mr. Landor a small portion of such advantages, at 
least of the latter ; a thousand could pour none effectually into his 
perttmum vas.^^ 

In the three or four years following the production of 
these plays and criticisms Landor was occupied almost en- 
tirely in preparing for press, with the indefatigable help 
of Mr. Forster, a collected edition of his writings. It was 
in 1846 that this edition at length appeared. It contain- 
ed the whole mass of Landor's work compressed into two 
tall volumes in royal octavo, with the text printed in 
double columns; an unattractive and inconvenient ar- 
rangement. The principal novelties in the collection were, 
first, the supplementary Conversations recovered from the 
light-hearted custody of Mr. Willis, together with others 
written during the last fifteen years, forty-two in all ; and 
next the Hellenics ; consisting of translations into Eng- 
lish blank verse, undertaken in the first instance at the sug- 
gestion of Lady Blessington, of those Idyllia of Landor's 
in Latin the first edition of which had been printed at Ox- 
ford in 1814, and the second at Pisa in 1820; together 



190 LANDOR. [chap. 

with some others written originally in English. The ded- 
ications of the original Convet'sations were not reprinted, 
several of the patriots and liberators to whom they were 
addressed having in the interval precipitated themselves, in 
Landor's esteem, from the pinnacle of glory to the abyss 
of shame. To the two volumes was prefixed instead a 
brief inscription addressed in terms of grateful affection 
to Julius Hare and John Forster ; to the latter of whom a 
second address in verse brought the book to a close. 

So vast and so diversified a mass of energetic thinking 
and masterly writing it would within the compass of any 
other two volumes be hard to find. But one whole class 
of Landor's work, and his own favourite class, had found 
no place in them — I mean his work in Latin — and accord- 
ingly he next set about collecting, correcting, and in part 
rewriting his productions in that language, both prose and 
verse. By dint of infinite pains and zeal on his own part, 
and on that of Mr. Forster, this final edition of his Latin 
writings was got through the press in 1847, in the shape 
of a small closely printed volume called Poemata et In- 
scriptiones. In the meantime a few lovers of poetry had 
been much struck by the choice and singular quality of 
the Hellenics. Landor was encouraged to reprint these 
poems separately, and in the course of this same year 
they were issued by the house of Moxon, with additions 
and revisions, in one of those small volumes in green cloth 
which the muse of Mr. Tennyson has so long made wel- 
come and familiar to our eyes. 

The massive individuality of Landor's mind was accom- 
panied, as we have seen, by a many-sided power of histor- 
ical sympathy, which made him at home not in one only 
but in several, and those the most dissimilar, ages of the 
past. The strenuous gravity and heroic independence of 



vtt.] HELLENICS. l91 

Puritan England had entered into his imaginative being, 
as well as the contented grace and harmonious self-posses- 
sion of ancient Hellas. But of all things he was perhaps 
the most of a Greek at heart. His freedom from any 
tincture of mysticism, his love of unconfused shapes and 
outlines, his easy dismissal of the unfathomable and the 
unknown, and steady concentration of the mind upon the 
purely human facts of existence, its natural sorrows and 
natural consolations, all helped him to find in the life of 
ancient Greece a charm without alloy, and in her songs 
and her philosophies a beauty and a wisdom without short- 
coming. Adequate scholarship, and a close literary famil- 
iarity with the Greek writers, fortified this natural sym- 
pathy with the knowledge which was wanting to Keats, 
whose flashes of luminous and enraptured insight into 
things Hellenic are for want of such knowledge lacking 
in coherency and in assurance. Landor on his part is 
without Keats's gift, the born poet's gift, of creative, un- 
taught felicity in epithet and language ; his power over 
language is of another kind, more systematic, trained, 
and regular. But in dealing with things Hellenic Landor 
strikes generally with complete assurance the true imagina- 
tive note. This is equally the case whether, as in Pericles 
and Aspasia, and in his dialogues of ancient philosophers 
and statesmen, he makes the Greeks themselves extol the 
glories of their race, or whether he trusts the exposition 
of those glories in the mouths of modern speakers, as 
when Michelangelo is made to remind Vittoria Colonna 
of the conquests of the race in war and art, of Salamis and 
the Prometheus of JEschylus, together : 

" The conquerors of kings until then omnipotent, kings who had 
trampled on the towers of Babylon and had shaken the eternal sanc- 
tuaries of Thebes, the conquerors of those kings bowed their olive- 



192 LANDOH. [chap. 

crowned heads to the sceptre of Destiny, and their tears flowed pro- 
fusely over the immeasurable wilderness of human woes." 

Hear, again, how Alfieri is made to correct the false taste 
of another Italian poet in his description of Pluto, and to 
draw in its place the true Greek picture of that god and 
of his kingdom : 

" Does this describe the brother of Jupiter ? does it not rather the 
devils of our carneval, than him at whose side, upon asphodel and 
amaranth, the sweet Persephone sits pensively contented, in that 
deep motionless quiet which mortals pity and which the gods enjoy, 
than him who, under the umbrage of Elysium, gazes at once upon 
all the beauties that on earth were separated by times and countries 
. . . Helena and Eriphyle, Polyxena and Hermione, Deidamia and Dei- 
anira, Leda and Omphale, Atalanta and Cydippe, Laodamia, with her 
arm around the neck of a fond youth, whom she still seems afraid 'of 
losing, and apart, the daughters of Niobe, though now in smiles, still 
clinging to their parent ; and many thousands more, each of whom is 
worth the dominions, once envied, of both brothers ?" 

Landor was a less accomplished master in verse than 
prose ; and we hardly find in the Hellenics anything equal 
to the lovely interlinked cadences, and the assured imag- 
inativQ ease and justice, of passages like this. What we 
do find is an extreme, sometimes an excessive, simplicity 
and reserve both of rhythm and language, conveying, in 
many instances at least, a delightful succession of classical 
images — images not only lucid in themselves, but more lu- 
cidly and intelligibly connected than had been Landor's 
wont in his earlier narrative poetry. The Hamadryad 
and its sequel, Aeon and Rhodope, of which no Latin orig- 
inal had been first composed, these with Enallos and Cy~ 
tnodameia are, I think, the choicest examples of the vein ; 
one or two of the others, such as the Altar of Modesty, 
liad better have been left in their original Latin. The 



VII.] HELLENICS. 193 

gem, however, of the volume, is to my mind not any one 
of mythologic tales or idyls, but the following brief, ex- 
quisitely wrought scene of household mourning. The 
husband, Elpenor, stands by the bedside of the wife, Ar- 
temidora, and speaks : 

" ' Artemidora ! Gods invisible, 

While thou wert lying faint along the couch, 

Have tied the sandals to thy slender feet, 
And stand beside thee, ready to convey 

Thy weary steps where other rivers flow. 
Kefreshing shades will waft thy weariness 
Away, and voices like thy own come near 
And nearer, and solicit an embrace.' 

Artemidora sigh'd, and would have prest 
The hand now pressing hers, but was too weak. 
Iris stood over her dark hair unseen 
While thus Elpenor spake. He lookt into 
Eyes that had given light and life erewhile 
To those above them, but now dim with tears 
And wakefulness. Again he spake of joy 
Eternal. At that word, that sad wordj^oy. 
Faithful and fond her bosom heaved once more ; 
Her head fell back : and now a loud deep sob 
Swell'd through the darken'd chamber ; 'twas not hers." 

Landor can never have seen those beautiful and character- 
istic works of Attic sculpture, the funeral monuments in 
which the death of the beloved is shadowed forth in a 
group representing, only with a touch of added solemnity 
in the expressions, his or her preparations for departure 
upon an ordinary journey or an ordinary day's work. But 
his poem is conceived in the very spirit of those sculptures. 
Like all his best work, it has to be read repeatedly and 
slowly before it will be found to have yielded up the full 
depth and tenderness of its meanings. The beauty of the 
dying woman implied, not described ; the gentle dealings 
9* 



194 LANDOR. [chap. 



with her of the unseen messenger of the gods who has 
placed the sandals about her feet in sleep ; the solicitude 
of the husband, who as long as she breathes will speak to 
her only words of comfort ; his worship, which, when he 
would tell her of the voices that will greet her beyond the 
tomb, can find no words to express their sweetness except 
by calling them "like her own;" the pressure with which 
she would, but cannot, answer him ; the quiver of the heart 
with which she expires upon the mention and the idea of 
joy — for what are those unknown and uncompanioned joys 
to her? — the bursting of the floodgates of his grief when 
there is no longer any reason for restraining it ; these things 
are conceived with that depth and chastity of tenderness, 
that instinctive beauty in pathos, which Landor shares with 
none but the greatest masters of the human heart. If we 
are to let ourselves notice the presence of imperfections 
or mannerisms in so beautiful a piece of work and of feel- 
ing, it will be to point out the mode (habitual with Lan- 
dor) in which the pronouns are made to do more work 
than they can well bear in the words " those above them ;" 
meaning the eyes of Elpenor, now, at the moment of the 
description, occupying a position above those of his wife, 
inasmuch as she is lying on the sick-bed and he standing 
over her. This is an instance of Landor's habit of exces- 
sive condensation ; just as the last lines contain an instance 
of his habit of needlessly avoiding, in narrative, the main 
fact of a situation, and relating instead some result or con- 
comitant of the situation from which the reader is required 
to infer its main fact for himself. 

To this 1847 edition of the Hellenics Landor prefixed 
a dedication in capital letters, which is a monument at 
once of the magnificence of his prose style and of the 
sanguine political enthusiasm which remained proof in 



las T 



tti.] ' HELLENICS. 195 

him against every disenchantment. The liberal Cardinal 
Mastai had just been elected Pope as Pio Nono, and for 
a moment the eyes of all Europe were turned in hope to- 
wards the new pontiff. To him, accordingly, Landor in- 
scribed his book. After a contrast of his opportunities 
and his purposes with those of Louis Philippe, the inscrip- 
tion concludes: 

" Cunning is not wisdom ; prevarication is not policy ; and (novel 
as the notion is, it is equally true) armies are not strength : Acre and 
Waterloo show it, and the flames of the Kremlin and the solitudes 
of Fontainbleau. One honest man, one wise man, one peaceful man, 
commands a hundred millions without a baton and without a charger. 
He wants no fortress to protect him : he stands higher than any 
citadel can raise him, brightly conspicuous to the most distant na- 
tions, God's servant by election, God's image by beneficence." 

The events of the next few years revived in Landor all 
the emotions of his earlier manhood. The year 1848 
seemed to him like another and more hopeful year 1821. 
The principles of popular government and of despotism 
once more encountered each other in the death-grapple. 
The struggle was sharper than the last had been ; a greater 
number of tyrannies reeled and tottered, and for a longer 
time ; but the final defeat was, at least it seemed to be, 
not less crushing, nor the final disappointment less com- 
plete. Against the renegadoes of liberty, such as the Pope 
himself and Louis Napoleon, there were no bounds to 
Landor's indignation. By the abilities and friendliness of 
the latter he had been, in personal intercourse at Gore 
House, quite won, and foreseeing after the revolution of 
1848 that he would soon be called to the absolute govern- 
ment of his country, was nevertheless inclined to believe 
in his integrity of purpose. But the first shot fired against 
republican Rome in the name of republican France, and 



196 LANDOR. [cQxP. 

by the authority of her President, " parted us," as Landor 
wrote, " for ever," and the verses in which Landor by-and- 
by denounced the refusal of the right of asylum to Kossuth 
seeni by their concentrated fire of scorn and indignation 
to anticipate the Chdtiments of Victor Hugo. Kossuth, 
Manin, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Tiirr, these, and especially 
Kossuth, are the great heroes of Landor's admiration now. 
He wrote a small, now almost undiscoverable, volume of 
Italics in verse, besides several new political Conversations 
— of Garibaldi with Mazzini ; of King Carlo- Alberto with 
the Princess Belgioioso ; and others again of reactionary 
cardinals and ministers with each other. Even after the 
movement of 1848 and 1849 had been for the time being 
diverted or utterly suppressed, Landor continued to be 
much preoccupied with questions of policy and govern- 
ment. In 1851 he published a series of letters on priest- 
craft and ecclesiastical organization, entitled Popery, British 
and Foreign, and about the same time a series of ten Let- 
ters to Cardinal Wiseman. In 1854 the approach of the 
Crimean war gave rise in the old man, now in his eightieth 
year, to reflexions on the necessity of curbing the power 
of Russia ; on the possibility of reconstituting the king- 
dom of Poland ; and on the sagacity and probable achieve- 
ments of Louis Napoleon, in whom he for a short time ex- 
perienced a brief return of confidence. These reflexions 
he cast into the shape of Letters, written nominally by an 
American travelling in England to a friend at home, and 
dedicated to Mr. Gladstone, with the words, "Sir, of all 
whom we have been trusting, you alone have never de- 
ceived us. Together with the confidence, the power of 
England is in your hands. May those hands, for the 
benefit of your country and of the world, be as strong as 
they are pure." 



n 



VII.] POLITICAL LETTERS. 197 

Three years later Landor addressed to Emerson a brief 
letter, the essence of proud urbanity and compendious 
force,, in which he rectified several of that writer's observa- 
tions concerning himself in the English Traits, and took 
occasion, amidst other strokes of the most serene auto- 
biographical candour, to state exactly his sentiments in 
regard to tyrannicide. After speaking of Alfieri, Landor 
goes on : 

"Had he been living in these latter days, his bitterness would 
have overflowed not on France alone, nor Austria in addition, the 
two beasts that have torn Italy in pieces, and are growling over her 
bones ; but more, and more justly, on those constitutional govern- 
ments which, by abetting, have aided them in their ingressions and 
incursions. We EngUsh are the most censurable of all. . . . The 
ministers of England have signed that Holy Alliance which delivered 
every free State to the domination of arbitrary and irresponsible des- 
pots. The ministers of England have entered more recently into 
treaties with usurpers and assassins. And now, forsooth, it is called 
assassination to remove from the earth an assassin ; the assassin of 
thousands ; an outlaw, the subverter of his country's, and even of his 
own, laws. The valiant and the wise of old thought differently." 

Backed by their authority, Landor goes on to contend 
that tyrannicide involves less misery than war, and to ac- 
knowledge that he for one holds and ever will hold that 
" the removal of an evil at the least possible cost is best." 
Some time before this, in 1853, two new volumes of 
Landor's writing had been put forth. One was simply a 
detached reprint of those of his imaginary conversations 
in which the speakers were ancient Greeks and Romans: 
Conversations of the Greeks and Romans the volume was 
called, and its dedication to Charles Dickens, in which he 
congratulates his friend above all things on his labours " in 
breaking up and cultivating the unreclaimed wastes of hu- 



198 LANDOR. [chap. 

manity," is another example of the combined warmth and 
heartiness of his friendships and the catholic justice of his 
appreciations. Landor's second volume of 1853, in ap- 
pearance uniform with the last-named, was called by him 
The Last Fruit off an Old Tree. It was dedicated to the 
Marchese d'Azeglio, and to the title-page was prefixed that 
quatrain of Landor's upon his seventy-fifty birthday which 
I have already quoted (p. 183). It contained eighteen new 
Conversations, most of them modern and political, besides 
a number of the prose pieces published during the past 
six years in pamphlets and newspapers. These included, 
besides the pieces of which mention has been made al- 
ready, an evidence of Landor's undecaying feeling towards 
the memory of Southey, in the shape of a remonstrance 
addressed to Lord Brougham on the public neglect both 
of that memory itself, and of the person of the poet's sur- 
viving son. Of himself Landor in this letter gives the 
monumental and just description : " I claim no place in 
the world of letters ; I am alone, and will be alone, as long 
as I live, and after." The poetry which concludes the vol- 
ume of Last Fruit is, Landor says, what I wish the prose 
could have been, mostly panegyrical ;" it consists, that is 
to say, in great part, of " epistles " and other pieces ad- 
dressed in the spirit of friendly discussion or more friendly 
praise to his comrades and juniors in the craft of letters. 
Last of all came five detached " scenes " in verse on the 
subject of the Cenci ; scenes written not in rivalry, still 
less in any implied depreciation, of the work of Shelley, 
but simply taking up the theme afresh, as it were by a 
different handle and from a different side. 

The two dramatic dialogues in Last Fruit — those of 
Leonora di Este, the beloved of Tasso, with Tasso's con- 
fessor, and of Admiral Blake with his brother Humphrey — • 



VII.] LAST FRUIT. 199 

are among tlie finest Landor ever wrote ; the modern po- 
litical, whether laudatory or satiric in their purport, are for 
the most part tedious enough. A long conversation be- 
tween Landor himself and Archdeacon Hare, represented 
as taking place in the course of a walk at Hurstmonceaux, 
is the ripest and most interesting of that class which be- 
gan thirty years before with the first dialogue of Johnson 
and Home Tooke. The discussion turns almost entirely 
on technical points of English literature and the English 
language. In it, among other things, Landor resumes, de- 
fends, and illustrates those principles of spelling which he 
had founded long ago on analogy and on the study of the 
early English writers, and which he had insisted on actual- 
ly putting into practice, to the distraction of his printers, 
in a large proportion of his published writings. Most of 
his readers had been accustomed to regard his usage in 
these matters as mere innovations dictated by arbitrary 
whim. Landor showed that he was guided not by whim 
but by principle, and denied that his changes were innova- 
tions at all. He knew that the current practice of any 
age in English spelling was purely a matter of accident 
and clistom ; and to the accident and custom of his own 
age he refused to bow in cases where he found those of 
another to be preferable. He drew up lists of those words 
which he found habitually spelt by any of the earlier 
writers, from Chaucer down, in a manner more consistent 
with derivation, with sound, or with analogy, than by the 
moderns. Thus a regard to derivation made him write 
exclame, proclame, strategem, instead of exclaim, proclaim, 
stratagem ; a regard to sound, /ore?z, sovran, interr, instead 
of foreign, sovereign, inter; to analogy, embassador, or else 
why embassy ? receit, or else why deceit and conceit ? 
grandor or grandour, or else why honour, labour, and not 



1 

HAP. W 



200 LANDOR. [chap. 

lionneur, labenr, and so on witli the rest? Fidelity to the 
spoken sound also made Landor banish the termination ed 
from the preterites and past participles of verbs ending 
with sibilant, or soft labial or guttural, consonants, and 
write wishtj dropt, lookt, instead of wished, dropped, 
looked. In this last usage Landor was followed by the 
brothers Hare, and by many of those on whom the Hares 
had influence; including, as we all know, no less a mas- 
ter than Mr. Tennyson. Custom, reasonable or other, has 
proved too strong to yield to others of Landor's proposed 
reforms. But for the student it is not easy to find better 
reading, a more instructive array of instances, or a more 
pointed and clenching method of presenting arguments, 
than are contained in his discussions on these mechanical 
and technical matters of language. Landor hated to be 
confounded with the so-called phonetic reformers of spell- 
ing, as Hartley Coleridge first, and afterwards one or two 
others, had confounded him. In this matter as in others 
he regarded himself essentially as a conservative, and all 
he proposed was to select for imitation and revival such 
portions of the practice of the best writers, from the four- 
teenth to the eighteenth centuries, as seemed on examina- 
tion to be most correct and rational. From the orthog- 
raphy of words the discussion passes on to the words 
themselves, and we find Landor inveighing in his most 
vigorous vein against the colloquial corruptions which he 
conceived to be defiling every day the fountains of his 
mother tongue. " Humbug " was a word which he barely 
agreed to tolerate; for "pluck," "sham," "traps" (mean- 
ing luggage), " giant trees," "monster meetings," "palmy 
days," and many other phrases of contemporary slang or 
contemporary fine WTiting, he had no toleration whatever. 
He felt like a sentinel keeping guard over the honour and 



VII.] LAST FRUIT. 201 

integrity of the English language. And for such a post 
no man was better fitted either by knowledge or reflexion. 
So massive and minute a literary acquaintance with his 
mother tongue, combined with so jealous and sensitive an 
instinct in its verbal criticism, have probably never existed 
in any other man. Nor was there ever a time when a sen- 
tinel was more needed. Even men of genius and of just 
popularity — a Carlyle, a Dickens, a Macaulay — had each in 
his way accustomed the millions of English-speaking and 
English-reading men to find their language forced into all 
manner of startling or glittering usages, of extravagant or 
unquiet forms and devices. There were few writers, and 
of these Landor was the foremost, who adhered to a clas- 
sical regularity of language and to a classical composure 
and restraint of style. Landor was rigorous in rejecting 
from his vocabulary all words but such as had stood the 
test of time. ' He was perhaps the most exact of all Eng- 
lish writers in observing the laws of logical and grammat- 
ical construction. His style was not founded on that of 
any master, but included, both in vocabulary and in struct- 
ure, the resources of all the best English prose writers, 
from Sir Thomas Browne and Milton to Horace Walpole 
and Lord Chesterfield. He was not given, except for spe- 
cial purposes, to the use of strong monosyllables, or of the 
curt Teutonic English which has been brought into fash- 
ion in our own time, but preferred rather, though not pe- 
dantically, the polysyllabic articulation of words derived 
from the Latin. 

In all this, however, Landor was as a voice crying in the 
wilderness. It is amazing now, and it was amazing then, 
that the grand old preacher should have so few listeners. 
The English-reading public had taken him at his word. 

They left him where he was content to remain, alone. 
O 



202 



lNDOR. 



CHAP. 



They gave him no place in the world 'of letters, while they 
excited themselves to passion over the work of scores of 
lesser men. Less attention was paid to him in England 
than in America, where about this time, 1856, a Selection 
of detached thoughts and sentences from the Conversations 
was published at Boston, with an admirable critical intro- 
duction by Mr. Hilliard. It is incredible, but true, that 
within three years of the publication of the Last Fruit an 
elaborate article on English prose style, appearing in an 
English magazine to which Landor was himself an occa- 
sional contributor, should have actually contained no men- 
tion of his name at all. This neglect did not trouble him 
in the least, nor did he regard with a shadow of envy the 
applause bestowed on others. " Caring not a straw for 
popularity, and little more for fame," he simply uttered 
from time to time the thoughts that were in him in the 
language which he found most fit. From a few, indeed, of 
those who themselves stood nearest him in power and art, 
every such utterance as it appeared drew forth a fresh 
tribute of homage. In 1856 Landor published in a sep- 
arate pamphlet (the "proceeds" destined, as of old, to a 
specified purpose of charity) a set of Scenes from, the 
Study — scenes again in verse, and again drawn fearlessly 
from a domain where the greatest had been at work before 
him. The subject was Antony and Cleopatra. " What 
an undaunted soul before his eighty years," writes Mrs. 
Browning, after reading them, " and how good for all 
other souls to contemplate !" Still, in the same year, he 
put some of his most pregnant thoughts on language, and 
especially, strange as it may seem, on the English language, 
into a dialogue between Al fieri and Metastasio, published 
in Frasers Magazine. " Do you think the grand old Pa- 
gan wrote that piece just now ?" asks Carlyle, in a letter 



VII.] DRY STICKS. 203 

written at the time. " The sound of it is like the ring of 
Roman swords on the helmets of barbarians ! The unsub- 
duable old Roman !" 

But alas! there came before long news of the old Ro- 
man which could not but make those who loved and hon- 
oured him regret that he had not succumbed earlier to the 
common lot. Of all Landor's wild collisions with the world 
of fact, the most melancholy and the most notorious befel 
him now in his patriarchal age. In 1856, the year of the 
Letter to Emerson and the Scenes from the Study, he had 
paid one of his now infrequent visits to London ; had 
joined a party of friends at the Crystal Palace, and been 
as vigorous and as whimsical in his talk as ever. From 
about the beginning of the next year, 1857, there seemed 
to be coming over him a change for the worse. His let- 
ters bespoke both physical decay and mental disturbance. 
Worse followed ; it was found that he had allowed him- 
self to be dragged headlong into a miserable and compro- 
mising quarrel between two ladies at Bath. One of these 
was the wife of a clergyman, the other a young girl, her 
bosom friend until the quarrel arose ; both had been very 
intimate with Landor during the last few years. To the 
younger he, with his royal and inveterate love of giving, 
had lately made over a small legacy in money, which had 
been left him as a token of friendship by Kenyon. In 
the course of the quarrel the elder lady, who had shortly 
before accepted help from the younger out of Landor's 
gift, took exception to the nature of her intimacy with the 
giver. Landor, on his part, utterly lost control of himself. 
Regarding himself as the champion of innocent youth 
against an abominable combination of fraud and calumny, 
in the frenzy of his indignant imagination he remembered 
or invented all kinds of previous malpractices against the 



204 LANDOR. Pchap. 

I 

foe. He betook himself to his old insane weapons, and 
both in print and writing launched invectives against her 
in an ultra-Roman taste. He vi^rote odious letters to her 
husband. Legal steps being set on foot to restrain him, 
his unfailing friend Forster came down to see what could 
be done. By his persuasions, joined to those of Landor's 
own lawyers, the enraged old man was with difficulty in- 
duced to sign an apology, coupled with an undertaking 
not to repeat his offence. But Mr. Forster had felt, at 
the time when this engagement was made, that Landor 
could hardly be trusted to remember or observe it. Age, 
illness, and indignation had rendered him for the time 
being uncontrollable and irresponsible. For the first time 
in more than twenty years he proceeded to act in defiance 
of Mr. Forster's advice in a matter of publication. Hav- 
ing recovered from the hostile party in the dispute a num- 
ber of scraps in verse, the least considered and least valu- 
able that he had thrown off during recent years, he entrust- 
ed them to an Edinburgh bourse to be sent to press, under 
the plea that copies of them were abroad, and would be 
made public by others if not by himself. The volume ap- 
peared early in 1858, under the title Dry Sticks^ fagoted hy 
W. S. Landor ; "by the late W. S. Lfindor," the old man 
had at first insisted that the title should run. The book 
was made up of the recovered scraps and epigrams in ques- 
tion ; with a few others in Latin ; besides a reprint, after 
an " occultation," as Landor put it, " of sixty years," of 
the Poems from the Arabic and Persian; and a number of 
complimentary pieces addressed by various writers to him- 
self. Unhappily the old man had not been able to restrain 
himself from adding also, in defiance of his signed engage- 
ment, one or two of his worst lampoons against his enemy. 
The enemy seems to have been nothing loth to take ad- 



VII.] BSy sticks. ^ob 

vantage of tlie fault, and a suit for damages was iriiuiedi- 
ately set on foot. Before it canae on Landor had a stroke 
which left him insensible for forty -eight hours^ and for 
some weeks afterwards he hung between life and death: 
His extraordinai'y strength, however, carried him throaghj 
and he came to himself better both in body and mind after 
his illness. The trial was in the meantime coming on at 
the August assize. Practically there could be no defence ; 
the attacks were on the face of them libellous, and Lan- 
dor's friends advised him to go abroad, in order if possi- 
ble to protect himself against the consequences of the in- 
evitable verdict ; first selling his personal property and 
pictures, and making a formal transfer of all his real prop- 
erty to his eldest son. This was accordingly done, and 
just before the trial came on the forlorn old man set out 
to leave his native land once more. 



CHAPTER Till. 



SECOND EXILE AND LAST DAYS HEROIC IDYLS— DEATH. 



[1858—1864.] 

On. his way to the Continent, Landor arrived suddenly at 
Mr. Forster's house, where Dickens and some others were 
at dinner. Dickens left the table to see him, expecting 
naturally to find him broken and cast down. But the old 
man's thoughts were far away ; he seemed as though no 
ugly or infuriating realities had any existence for him, and 
sat talking in his most genial vein, principally about Latin 
poetry. " I would not blot him out, in his tender gallant- 
ry, as he sat upon his bed at Forster's that night, for a 
million of wild mistakes at eighty-four years of age ;" so 
wrote the manly-hearted and understanding witness who 
then saw Landor for the last time. This was on the 12th 
of July, 1858. The trial came on at Gloucester in the next 
month, and the jury brought in a verdict of 1000/. damages 
against the defendant. 

Stricken but unsubdued, his strength and his intellectual 
faculties even in some slight degree restored, Landor had 
in the meantime travelled as far as Genoa, where it was his 
intention to take up his abode. Advice well meant but 
injudicious prevailed on him to change his plan. He 
pushed on to Fiesole, and rejoined his family in the villa 
which he had once loved so well, and which it was just 
three and twenty years ago smce he had left. At first he 



CHAP, vlii.] SECOND EXILE AND LAST DAYS. ^61 

received some degree of contentment and even pleasure 
from his return to his old Italian home ; and it is affecting 
to read the verses in which the old man's sense of dignity 
and high desert struggles invincibly with the conscious- 
ness of his humiliation, and he endeavours to find in the 
charm of his present surroundings a consolation for his 
late disasters : 

** If I extoU'd the virtuous and the wise, 
The brave and beautiful, and well discern'd 
Their features as they fixt their eyes on mine, 
If I have won a kindness never wooed. 
Could I foresee that . . . fallen among thieves, 
Despoil'd, halt, wounded . . . tramping traffickers 
Should throw their dirt upon me, not without 
Some small sharp pebbles carefully inclosed ? 
However, from one crime they are exempt ; 
They do not strike a brother, striking me. 

This breathes o'er me a cool serenity, 
O'er me divided from old friends, in lands 
Pleasant, if aught without old friends can please, 
Where round their lowly turf -built terraces 
Grey olives twinkle in this wintery sun, 
And crimson light invests yon quarried cliff, 
And central towers from distant villas peer 
Until Arezzo's ridges intervene." 

But these consolations were not destined to endure. 
Landor's fate had still fresh trials in reserve. The scandal 
of the Bath affair made some of his old friends in Florence 
look coldly on him, and among them the English minister, 
Lord Normanby. At this the old man was wounded to 
the quick ; and if the whole case were not so deeply melan- 
choly, we might well smile at the majestic document in 
which he presently relieved his feelings : 

" My Lord, — Now I am recovering from an illness of several 



208 LANDOR. [chap. 

months' duration, aggravated no little by your lordship's rude recep- 
tion of me at the Cascine, in presence of my family and innumerable 
Florentines, I must remind you in the gentlest terms of the occur- 
rence. 

" We are both of us old men, my lord, and are verging on decrepi- 
tude and imbecility, else my note might be more energetic. I am 
not inobservant of distinctions. You by the favour of a minister are 
Marquis of Normanby, I by the grace of God am 

"Walter Savage Landor." 

But worse than any slight inflicted by a minister were 
the crosses which Landor found that he had to endure at 
home. Time had done nothing to diminish, but rather 
everything to increase, the incompatibilities between him- 
self and those of his household. By settlement, deed of 
gift, deed of transfer, or otherwise, Landor had now made 
over all his property to his wife and children — the bulk of 
it to his eldest son — and except for a small sum in ready 
money which he had brought with him, he was absolutely 
dependent upon his family for the means of subsistence. 
Doubtless he was a wilful and unmanageable inmate in the 
house to which he had so long been a stranger. None the 
less was it the obvious duty of those nearest him, and en- 
riched at his expense, either to make his life, at whatever 
cost of compliance and forbearance, endurable to him un- 
der their common roof, or else to provide him with the 
means of living in his own way elsewhere. It seems only 
too certain that they made no serious or patient attempt 
to do the former; and the latter, when Landor desired it, 
they declined to do. Pathetic, almost tragic, was the por- 
tion of the old man in those days, a Lear who found no 
kindness from his own. Thrice he left the villa with the 
determination to live by himself in Florence ; but his wish 
was not indulged, and thrice he was brought back to the 
home which was no home for him, and where he was dealt 



I 



Till.] SECOND EXILE AND LAST DAYS. 209 

with neither generously nor gently. The fourth time he 
presented himself in the house of Mr. Browning with only 
a few pauls in his pocket, declaring that nothing should ever 
induce him to return. 

Mr. Browning, an interview with the family at the villa 
having satisfied him that reconciliation or return was in- 
deed past question, put himself at once in communication 
with Mr. Forster and with Landor's brothers in England. 
The latter instantly undertook to supply the needs of 
their eldest brother during the remainder of his life. 
Thenceforth an income sufficient for his frugal wants was 
forwarded regularly for his use through the friend who 
had thus come forward at his need. To Mr. Browning's 
respectful and judicious guidance Landor showed himself 
docile from the first. Removed from the inflictions, real 
and imaginary, of his life at Fiesole, he became another 
man, and at times still seemed to those about him like the 
old. Landor at his best. It was in July, 1859, that the 
new arrangements for his life were made. The remainder 
of that summer he spent at Siena, first as the guest of 
Mr. Story, the American sculptor and poet, next in a cot- 
tage rented for him by Mr. Browning near his own. In 
the autumn of the same year Landor removed to a set 
of apartments in the Via Nunziatina in Florence, close to 
the Casa Guidi, in a house kept by a former servant of 
Mrs. Browning's, an Englishwoman married to an Italian. 
Here he continued to live during the five years that yet 
remained to him. He was often susceptible, querulous, 
unreasonable, and full of imaginings. The Bath trial and 
its consequences pressed upon his mind with a sense of 
bewildering injury which at times stung him almost to 
madness. The deed of transfer to his eldest son had on 
appeal been in so far practically set aside that the damages 
10 



210 LA^DOH. [cHAi*. 

awarded by the jury had after all to be paid. Landor 
was always scheming how he might clear his character by 
establishing the true facts of the case ; that is to say, by 
repeating the self-same charges the publication of which 
had already cost him so much. He caused a " vindica- 
tion " to be printed, and wrote pressing Mr. Forster to 
help him to get it made public. When his instances to 
this effect were received with silence or remonstrance, he 
imagined grievances against even that proved and devoted 
friend, and suspended communications with him for a 
time. The delay which ensued in the issue of a new edi- 
tion of his Hellenics, prepared partly before he left Eng- 
land and partly while he was still at Fiesole, exasperated 
him much as similar delays had exasperated him of old, 
and led, as of old, to the burning, in a moment of irrita- 
tion, of a quantity of literary materials that lay by him. 

Notwithstanding all these private self-tormentings and 
indignant lashings of the wounded lion in his retreat, he 
remained to his small circle of friends and visitors in 
Florence a figure the most venerable and the most impres- 
sive. Although weaker in all ways, he retained all his 
ancient distinction, and many of his ancient habits. He 
had found a successor to Pomero in the shape of another 
dog of the same breed which had been given him by Mr. 
Story. The name of this new pet was Giallo, and Giallo 
became to Landor's last days all that Pomero had been 
before. Landor, who in the first two or three of these years 
at Florence still contrived to walk to a moderate extent, 
became known to th6 new generation of Florentines as the 
old man with the beautiful dog, il vecchio con quel bel 
canino. He frequented too, again, his old haunts among 
the picture-dealers, and bought out of his slender pittance 
almost as many bad pictures as of yore. The occasional 



vni.] SECOND EXILE AND LAST DAYS. 21 1 

society and homage of some old friends and some new 
prevented Ms life from being too solitary. The death of 
Mrs. Browning in 1861, and her husband's consequent 
departure for ''England, took away from him his best 
friends of all. He had found also a great pleasure in the 
society of a youiig Ainerican lady, Miss Kate Field, who 
has given us an affectionate portrait of the old man in 
these declining days. Almost toothless now, and partially 
deaf, his appearance was changed by the addition of a 
flowing and snow-white beard. This, every one said, made 
him look more like an old lion than ever, and he liked, as 
he had always liked, to be reminded of the resemblance. 
He could still be royal company when he pleased. He 
taught his young American friend Latin, and opened out 
for her with delight the still abundant treasures of his 
mind. His memory for new friends, and for names in 
general, as well as for recent events, had become uncertain ; 
but his remoter recollections, his stories, as he used to call 
them, "of the year one," were as vivid and full of power 
as ever. It produced upon his hearers an effect almost of 
awe to hsten to this heroic survivor of another age, whose 
talk, during the last ministry of Lord Palmerston, and on 
the eve of the American war of Secession, would run on 
things which he remembered under the first ministry of 
Pitt, or as a child during the American war of Indepen- 
dence. Garibaldi was the hero of his old age as Washing- 
ton had been the hero of his youth. He followed with 
passionate interest the progress of Italian emancipation. 
He insisted one day that his watch should be pawned and 
the proceeds given to the fund in aid of Garibaldi's wound- 
ed. He was more indignant than ever with his old ac- 
quaintance, the French Emperor, for his treacherous deal- 
ings with the Italian nation. He wrote political epigrams 



212 nHr LANDOR. [chap. 

in English and political odes in Latin ; an address in Eng- 
lish to the Sicilians ; and, in far from faultless Italian, a 
dialogue between Savonarola and the Prior of St. Mark's 
— the proceeds to go, as the watch had only been prevent- 
ed by the care of his friends from going, for the benefit 
of Garibaldi's wounded. 

In these days the books which the old man liked best 
to read were novels, and he got from the library and read 
with delight some of those of Trollope and of his old 
friend G. P. R. James, speaking and writing of the latter 
in particular with an extravagant partiality of praise. He 
would often talk of books, and of the technical matters of 
language and the literary art, with all his old mastery and 
decision. On such points he was much given to quoting 
the opinion of his dog Giallo. Giallo, he said, was the 
best of critics as well as the most delightful of companions, 
and it was not " I," but *^ Giallo and I," who paid visits 
or entertained views on politics and literature. Giallo 
was the subject of many verses, extemporary and other. 
" Why, Giallo," said the old man one day, " your nose is 

hot, 

" But he is foolish who supposes 
Dogs are ill that have hot noses." 

Here are some unpublished lines of great feeling, written 
on the same theme, which I find under date of Aug. 1, 1860 : 

*' Giallo I I shall not see thee dead, 
Nor raise a stone above thy head, 
For I shall go, some years before, 
Where thou wilt leap at me no more, 
Nor bark, as now, to make me mind, 
Asking me, am I deaf or blind. 
No, Giallo, but I shall be soon, 
And thoU wilt scratch my turf and moan." 



Yin.] SECOND EXILE AND LAST DAYS, 213 

Humorous denunciations of modern slang and modern 
ill -manners formed also a considerable part of Landor's 
talk in these days. His own manners remained, while 
strength was left, as fine as ever. He was full of beauti- 
ful complimentary speeches, of quick and graceful retorts, 
of simple old-fashioned presents and attentions. He would 
always see his lady friends to the door, and help them 
into their carriage bare-headed. If he accompanied them, 
as he sometimes did, on their drives, he would always 
take his place on the back seat. One day they were 
deeply touched by his expression of a wish to drive up to 
the gate of the Fiesolan villa, and by the look of wistful- 
ness which came over his noble aged face as he sat in si- 
lence, gazing at that alienated home for the last time. 

His American friends before long departed too, and the 
old man was left with less company than ever, except that 
of Giallo, and of his own thoughts and memories. He 
continued at intervals to take pleasure in the society of 
Mr. Robert (now Earl) Lytton, and in that of the son of 
his old friend Francis Hare, to whom he had been full of 
kindness and of attention throughout his boyhood. Lit- 
tle by little the fire of life sank lower in him. He grew 
deafer and deafer, so that at last the visits of his old 
friend Kirkup, now also deaf, almost ceased to give him 
pleasure. He suffered more and more from cough, dizzi- 
ness, and disinclination for food. He became less and 
less conscious of outward and present facts, or conscious 
of them only for moments of brief and half -bewilder- 
ed awakening. His letters of these years are short, and 
more abrupt than ever, though each proposition they con- 
tain, no matter how trivial its subject, is generally as vig- 
orous and as stately in form as of old. From 1861 to 
18^3 Mr. Browning was Landor's principal correspondent, 



214 LANDOR. [chap. 

In the last year of his life he ceased to remember his un- 
reasonable grievance against Mr. Forster, and wrote to 
him with all his old warmth and gratefulness of affection, 
expressly confirming, among other things, the choice by 
which he had long ago designated him as his biographer 
and literary executor. 

In his inward life and the customary operations of his 
mind, Landor continued almost to the last to retain an 
astonishing and unquenchable vigour. He was continual- 
ly taking up pen and paper in the old sudden way to put 
down fragments that he had been composing, whether in 
verse or prose, in English or in Latin. " I am sometimes 
at a loss for an English word," he said to a friend about 
this time, "never for a Latin." Two volumes of his writ- 
ing, chiefly in verse, appeared after his return to Italy. 
The first of these, long delayed in the press, was a second 
and enlarged edition of the Hellenics of 1847. Of the 
idyls contained in the earlier edition the majority here 
appear again, some having been completely re -written, 
that is to say re-translated, from the original Latin, in the 
interval. One or two pieces which appeared in the old 
volume are omitted, and among those introduced for the 
first time are several Greek scenes and idyls, including 
metrical versions of two of his former prose dialogues, 
Achilles and Helena^ and Peleus and Thetis, and one or 
two pieces not belonging to the Greek cycle at all. The 
old dedication to Pio Nono is replaced by one to Sir 
William Napier, and this is followed by a graceful invo- 
cation to the Muses to " come back home " — home, that 
is, from less congenial haunts to the scenes and the mem- 
ories of Hellas. On the whole, this edition of the Hel- 
lenics is neither in form nor in substance an improvement 
of that in 1847. 'It was four years latev that theye ap- 



I 



viil] heroic idyls. 215 

peared Landor's next, and last, volume, the Heroic Idyls. 
In the interval he had contributed two or three prose 
dialogues to the Athenceum. The Heroic Idyls is a vol- 
ume entirely of verse, about four parts English and one 
part Latin. Besides a number of personal and occasional 
pieces, some written recently, and many long ago, in Lan- 
dor's usual vein between epigrammatic trifling and tender 
gravity, there are in this volume some half-a-dozen new 
dialogues or dramatic scenes in verse, of which Theseus 
and Hippolyta, and the Trial of ^schylus, are among 
Landor's very best work in this kind. Here, from the 
dialogue of the Amazonian Queen and her Athenian van- 
quisher, is an example of the poetry which the old man 
was still capable of writing at eighty-eight : 

^'■Theseus. My country shall be thine, and there thy state 
Regal. 
Hippolyta. Am I a child ? give me my own, 

And keep for weaker heads thy diadems. 
Thermodon I shall never see again, 
Brightest of rivers, into whose clear depth 
My mother plunged me from her warmer breast, 
And taught me early to divide the waves 
With arms each day more strong, and soon to chase 
And overtake the father swan, nor heed 
His hoarser voice or his uplifted wing." 

Let us only add from the Heroic Idyls a few lines of 
its brief preface, turned with Landor's old incomparable 
air of temperate and dignified self-assurance — 

" He who is within two paces of his ninetieth year may sit down 
and make no excuses ; he must be unpopular, he never tried to 
be much otherwise ; he never contended witji a contemporary, but 
walked alone on the far eastern uplands, meditating and rememr 
bering," 



216 LANDOR. [chap. viii. 

The Heroic Idyls appeared in the autumn of 1863, 
with a dedication to Mr. Edward Twisleton, to whom Lan- 
dor had a few months before entrusted the manuscript of 
the volume to be brought home. The society of this ac- 
complished scholar and amiable gentleman was almost the 
last in which Landor was able to take pleasure. From the 
beginning of 1864 his infirmities of all kinds increased 
upon him. Even after the publication of the Heroic 
Idyls he had sent home a new batch of five short dia- 
logues in prose and verse. But the end was now fast 
approaching. In the mid-spring of his eighty-ninth year 
(1864) he was still able to take a momentary pleasure and 
interest in the visit of the young English poet, Mr. Swin- 
burne, already the most ardent of his admirers, and soon 
to become the most melodious of his panegyrists, who had 
made a pilgrimage to Florence on purpose to see the old 
man's face before he died. Except for such transitory 
awakenings, Landor had sunk by the summer of 1864 into 
almost complete unconsciousness of external things. He 
could still call his faculties about him for a few minutes, 
to write fragments of verse, or short notes to Mr. Brown- 
ing or Mr. Forster, but these notes are often incoherent 
and interrupted. During these last months his two 
youngest sons came down from the villa, and tended with 
kindness the closing hours of their father. About the 
middle of September the throat trouble from whicb he 
had long suffered brought on a difficulty in swallowing. 
He refused to take nourishment, and sank, after three 
days' abstinence, in a fit of coughing, on the l7th Septem- 
ber, 1864. 

And so the indomitable spirit was spent at last, and the 
old lion was at rest. 



CHAPTER IX. 

CONCLUSION. 

"I NEVER did a single wise thing in the whole course of 
ray existence, although I have written many which have 
been thought such," reflects Landor, in one of the scrawled 
and fugitive confessions of his last years. Landor's power 
lay, in truth, not in doing, but in thinking and saying. 
His strength was not in the management of life, but in the 
creative and critical operations of the mind. Of all men 
who ever lived, none furnishes a more complete type of 
what Mr. Matthew Arnold, in speaking* of Dante, calls 
"the born artist, the born solitary ;" the man to be judged 
not by his acts but by his utterances. Or, if we are to 
judge these unpractical spirits by their acts also, by their 
outward as well as by their inward manifestations, then the 
test which we apply must be the test not of success, but of 
intention. It is not in their nature to be successful ; it 
was in Landor's nature least of all. Dashed by his vol- 
canic temperament and his blinding imagination into col- 
lision with facts, he suffered shipwreck once and again. 
But if we apply to his character and career the measure 
not of results, but of intention, we shall acknowledge in 
Landor a model on the heroic scale of many noble and 
manly virtues. He had a heart infinitely kind and tender. 
His generosity was royal, delicate, never hesitating. In 
P 10* 



218 LANDOR. [chap, 

his pride there was no iiioroseness, in his independence 
not a shadow of jealousy. From spite, meanness, or un- 
charitableness be w'as utterly exempt. He was loyal and 
devoted in friendship, and, what is rare, at least as prone 
to idealize the virtues of his friends as the vices of his 
enemies. Quick as was his resentment of a slight, his 
fiercest indignations were never those which he conceived 
on personal grounds, but those with which he pursued an 
injustice or an act of cruelty ; nor is there wanting an ele- 
ment of nobleness and chivalry in even the wildest of his 
breaches with social custom. He was no less a worshipper 
of true greatness than he was a despiser of false. He 
hated nothing but tyranny and fraud, and for those his 
hatred was implacable. His bearing under the conse- 
quences of his own impracticability was of an admirable 
courage and equanimity. True, he did not learn by expe- 
rience; but then neither did he repine at misfortune. 
Another man, conscious of his intentions, and reaping the 
reward he reaped, would have never ceased to complain. 
Landor wore a brave face always, and after a catastrophe 
counted up, not his losses, but his consolations, his "felici- 
ties," reckoning among them even that sure symptom of 
a wholesome nature, the constant pleasantness of his night- 
ly dreams. There is a boyishness about his outbreaks from 
first to last. At the worst, he is like a kind of gigan- 
tic and Olympian schoolboy ; a nature passionate, unteach- 
able, but withal noble, courageous, loving-hearted, bountiful, 
wholesome and sterling to the heart's core. 

But it is the work and not the life of a man like Lan- 
dor which in reality most concerns us. In his work, then, 
as it seems to me, Landor is a great and central artist in 
his mother tongue, and a great creative master of historic 
sentiment and of the human heart. He is at the same 



p. 1' 



IX.] CONCLUSION 219 

time a great critic — I use the word in its natural sense, 
the sense in which criticism is distinguished from creation 
— a great critic of life ; a masterly, if occasionally capri- 
cious, critic of literature; a striking, if impulsive and im- 
petuous, critic of history and government. 

The causes of his scant popularity are not difficult to 
discern. His thoughts were not of a nature especially to 
stir his own or any one time. He was, indeed, the son of 
his age in his passion for liberty, and in his spirit of hu- 
manity and tenderness for the dumb creation ; and his 
imaginative instinct and imaginative longings in the di- 
rection of ancient Hellas were shared by the general Eu- 
ropean culture of his time. But for the rest he ranged, 
apart from the passions or the tempests of the hour, 
among the heroic figures of the past and the permanent 
facts and ^experiences of life. He " walked along the far 
eastern uplands, meditating and remembering ;" and to the 
far eastern uplands those who could walk with him must 
brace themselves to mount. Even then there are difficul- 
ties arising from that want of consideration and sympathy 
in Landor for his readers of which I have spoken. He 
sometimes puzzles us for want of explanations, and often 
fatigues us with intrusive disquisitions. These, however, 
are the imperfections of a great master, and the way to 
counteract them is by providing the student with help 
where help is wanted ; by selection, above all, and in the 
next place by occasional comment or introduction. A 
selection or golden treasury of Landor's shorter dramatic 
dialogues, edited with such helps for the reader as I sug- 
gest, would be, as was said long ago by Julius Hare, " one 
of the most beautiful books in the language, that is to say 
in the world." From the longer, the discursive dialogues, 
perhaps the only selection possible for popular use would 



220 LANDOR. [chap. 

be one on the principle adopted by Mr. Hilliard — a selec- 
tion, that is, of detached sentences and sayings. These 
form a kind of literature in which England since the sev- 
enteenth century has not been rich ; and from the conver- 
sations and other prose writings of Landor there is to be 
gathered such an anthology of them as the literature of 
France itself could hardly surpass. If, indeed, there is any 
English writer who can be compared to Pascal for power 
and compression, for incisive strength and imaginative 
breadth together, in general reflections, and for the com- 
bination of conciseness with splendour in their utterance, 
it is certainly Landor. Space has failed me to illustrate 
or do more than name this province of his genius. The 
true Landorian, no doubt, will prefer to dig these jewels 
for himself from their surroundings — surroundings some- 
times attractive and sometimes the reverse ; but true Lan- 
dorians may at present be counted on the fingers, and I 
speak of what has to be done in order to extend to wider 
circles the knowledge of so illustrious a master. 

In calling him a great artist in English letters, I refer 
rather to his prose than to his verse. He was equally at 
home, as I began by saying, in both forms, but it is in 
prose only that he is at his best. He had himself no illu- 
sions upon this point, and consistently declared, at least 
after he had applied himself to the Imaginary Conversa- 
tions, that poetry was his amusement, prose his proper 
study and business. Again : " The only thing which 
makes me imagine that I cannot be a very bad poet, is 
that I never supposed myself to be a very good one." 
That which essentially distinguishes poetry from prose is 
the presence of two inseparable elements in just propor- 
tion — emotion, and the musical regulation and control of 
emotion. In the poetry of Landor the element of control 



.p. I 



IX.] CONCLUSION. 221 

is apt to be in excess ; his verses are apt to be sedate to 
the point of tameness. As a matter of critical preference, 
indeed, he preferred the poetry of sobriety and restraint to 
the poetry of vehemence and of enthusiasm. " What is 
there lovely in poetry unless there be moderation and com- 
posure ?" Well and good ; but observing moderation and 
composure, it is still possible to strike and to maintain the 
true poetical pitch and poetical ring. Landor strikes them 
often, but never, as it seems to me, maintains them long. 
Therefore his quite short pieces, whether gay or grave, 
pieces that express a fancy or an emotion with neatness 
and precision approaching the epigrammatic, and with mu- 
sical cadences of extreme simplicity, are, on the whole, his 
best. His lighter autobiographical verses of all kinds, and 
including those written at greater length in blank verse or 
eight-syllable rhymes, contain much, as the reader will have 
perceived by such specimens as we have been able to give, 
that is in a high degree dignified, interesting, and graceful. 
In his loftier flights Landor is admirable and disappoint- 
ing by turns. In high-pitched lyrical writing he will start 
often with a magnificent movement — 

" Not were that submarine 
Gem-lighted city mine " — 

and fall within a few lines into a prosaic sedateness both 
of thought and sound. In high-pitched narrative or dra- 
matic writing he is sometimes more sustained ; but when, 
in verse, Landor becomes sustained, he is apt also to be- 
come monotonous. 

But if Landor is a poet, so far as concerns the form of 
his verse, only of the second order, he is unquestionably a 
prose writer of the very first. " Good prose," he says, " to 
say nothing of the original thoughts it conveys, may be in- 



222 LANDOR. [chap. 

finitely varied in modulation. It is only an extension of 
metres, an amplification of harmonies, of which even the 
best and most varied poetry admits but few." Landor had 
too rigid and mechanical a conception of the laws of verse ; 
in the extended metres and amplified harmonies of prose 
he was an extraordinary and a noble master. There was 
not the simplest thing but received in his manner of saying- 
it a charm of sound as well as a natural and e'rave distinc- 
tion of air; there was not the most stupendous in the say- 
ing of which he ever allowed himself to lose moderation 
or control. His passion never hurries bim, in prose, into 
the regular beats or equi-distant accents of verse ; he ac- 
cumulates clause upon clause of towering eloquence, but in 
the last clause never fails to plant his period composedly 
and gracefully on its feet. His perfect instinct for the 
rhythms and harmonies of prose reveals itself as fully in 
three lines as in a hundred. It is only a great master of 
prose who could have written this : 

" A bell warbles the more mellifluously in the air when the sound 
of the stroke is over, and when another swims out from underneath 
it, and pants upon the element that gave it birth." 

Or this : 

" There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave : there 
are no voices, Rhodop^, that are not soon mute, however tuneful : 
there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love re- 
peated, of which the echo is not faint at last." 

But harmony and rhythm are only the superficial beau- 
ties of a prose style. Style itself, in the full meaning of 
the word, depends upon something deeper and more in- 
ward. Style means the instinctive rule, the innate princi- 
ple of selection and control, by which an artist shapes and 
regulates every expression of his mind. Landor was in 



|i 



IX.] CONCLUSION. 223 

English prose an artist comparable with the highest in 
their respective spheres ; with Milton in English verse, or 
with Handel in music. He was as far as possible from 
seeking after or recommending any of the qualities gen- 
erally denoted by fine writing. So far as he sought after 
or recommended anything, it was the study of simplicity, 
parsimony, and the severest accuracy in s'peech. " I hate 
false words, and seek with care, difficulty, and moroseness 
those that fit the thing." If Landor is at times a magnil- 
oquent and even a pompous writer, the reason is that his 
large words befit the largeness of his thoughts and images, 
and pomp is the natural expression of his genius. The 
instinct of dignity, combined with the study of simplicity 
and directness ; natural majesty, and the absence of arti- 
ficial ornament ; these are the first characteristics of Lan- 
dor's prose. The next are the completeness and mutual 
independence of its separate clauses and periods. His sen- 
tences are apt to stand alone like his ideas, and to consist 
either of single clauses, each giving accurate expression to 
a single thought, or of carefully harmonized and adjusted 
groups of clauses giving expression to a group of closely 
connected and interdependent thoughts. The best skele- 
ton type of a Landorian sentence is that which we quoted 
some pages back on Lord Bvron : " I had avoided him ; 
I had slighted him; he knew it; he did not love me; he 
could not." No conjunctions, no transitions ; each state- 
ment made by itself, and their connexion left to be dis- 
cerned by the reader. If we take the most sustained ex- 
amples of Landor's eloquence, we shall find in them so 
many amplified and enriched examples of the same meth- 
od. These qualities render his prose an unrivalled vehicle 
for the expression of the more stable, permanent, massive 
order of ideas and im?]ges. But for expressing ideas of 



224 LANDOR. [chap, ix 

sequence, whether the sequence of propositions in an arg 
ment, or the sequence of incidents in a narrative, Landor's 
style is less adapted. There is a natural analogy between 
various manners of writing and the other arts; and the 
ordinary criticism on Landor, that he seems to write in 
marble, is true enough. Solidity, beauty and subtlety of 
articulation, mass with grace, and strength with delicacy, 
these are the qualities which he obtains to perfection, but 
he obtains them at the price of a certain immobility. He 
was probably right in believing that he had imparted to 
his work yet another of the qualities of marble — its im- 
perishableness. 



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Office Money Order or Draft, to avoid chance of loss. 

Address: HARPER & BROTHERS, 

Fbankun Sc^uare, New York. 






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